Quotes of the Day:
“Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.”
- George Jean Nathan
“Stay focused on the mission. Line up military tasks with political objectives. Avoid mission creep and allow for mission shifts. A mission shift is a conscious decision, made by political leadership in consultation with the military commander, responding to a changing situation.”
- General Anthony Zinni
"Mankind will never see an end of trouble until lovers of wisdom come to hold political power, or the holders of power become lovers of wisdom."
- Plato
1. After 20 years of anti-terror work, CIA gets back to spycraft basics in shift to China
2. U.S. designates N. Korean defense minister, others for human rights violation
3. 'I couldn’t kill innocent people': Myanmar soldiers defect to join resistance
4. Russian Propaganda Brags of Putin’s Military Blackmail Against the U.S.
5. A white supremacist march in D.C. was pushed by a fake Twitter account, experts say
6. FB's struggle with Gateway Pundit highlights challenge of containing disinformation
7. 'Elevating' hidden ideas: Inside the Army's Dragon's Lair invention contest
8. Why Is China Insisting It Is a Democracy?
9. Steven Metz, To Deter China, Think Big,
10. Defense Intelligence Agency Expected to Lead Military’s Use of ‘Open Source’ Data
11. Inside the Fall of Kabul
12. Don’t Sell Out Ukraine
13. Has Washington’s Policy Toward Taiwan Crossed the Rubicon?
14. White House is a ‘hurdle’ to Marine vet son Austin Tice’s release from Syria, mother says
15. India and Russia sign arms, trade deals straining tense relationship with US
16. The Secret History of the U.S. Diplomatic Failure in Afghanistan
17. Is it really true that the active duty and veteran ranks are rife with extremists? Get the facts before you decide
18. One of the military's most common infiltration methods is a risky maneuver no matter who's doing it
19. FDD | The U.S. Must Better Explain Al-Qaeda to the Public
20. Gaza Militant Group Raises Funds via Cryptocurrency for Jihad Against Israel
1. After 20 years of anti-terror work, CIA gets back to spycraft basics in shift to China
But this article focuses in part on personnel management.
Excerpt:
This relatively obscure personnel management shift could have significant impact on the lives of spies, particularly earlier in their careers. Since a few years after 9/11, officers have had more freedom to move around to different assignments within the agency — rather than have their trajectory scripted.
I wonder if there are best practices of personnel management (talent management) that could be shared between the intelligence and the special operations community since there are similar needs to be able to develop regional expertise.
After 20 years of anti-terror work, CIA gets back to spycraft basics in shift to China
Washington (CNN)The CIA is overhauling how it trains and manages its network of spies as part of a broader effort to transition away from 20 years of counterterrorism wars and focus more closely on adversaries like China and Russia, multiple sources familiar with the move tell CNN.
After two decades of intense paramilitary action against Islamist terror groups, some former officers and intelligence overseers say the CIA needs to get back to the kind of traditional, quiet tradecraft needed to collect intelligence against complex nation-states — in particular China, which senior officials have openly acknowledged presents the agency with its biggest challenge.
In theory, the change will allow the CIA to better staff remote outposts seen as critical to the China mission — places like west Africa, for example, that have a lot of Chinese infrastructure investment but are seen as too far away from the action to be a desirable assignment, sources said.
It will also help ensure that the agency is developing officers with the appropriate expertise over the long term. Beyond just hiring more Mandarin speakers and investing in technology, the move cuts to the very heart of the CIA: its human intelligence collectors.
This relatively obscure personnel management shift could have significant impact on the lives of spies, particularly earlier in their careers. Since a few years after 9/11, officers have had more freedom to move around to different assignments within the agency — rather than have their trajectory scripted.
Made at a time when the CIA needed to staff America's growing war zones, the post-9/11 change was controversial among officers. While it gave them more flexibility, some former operations officers say the result was that officers received less mentorship and thoughtful career development as a result.
Under the new policy, the CIA's so-called mission centers — the units within the agency focused on particular geographic regions or transnational challenges — will have more control over the assignments and language and other training that an operations officer receives over the long term.
Although there is some flexibility in the new policy, sources say — officers won't be locked into one geographical area exclusively — in general they won't become a free agent until later in their careers.
With some variations, the new policy is a return to how the agency managed the careers of its young officers before the counterterrorism wars.
"The agency appears in many ways to be trying to replicate some of the things that worked well before the counterterrorism wars dominated everyone's focus," said Thad Troy, a former operations officer who served as chief of station in several European capitals. He cautioned he did not have knowledge of the policy change.
Tying officers to a geographic area or functional issue "serves a worldwide mission better because you were developing and perfecting that geographical, issue — or in some cases, specific tradecraft expertise — and you were giving officers a place to grow, develop, and establish mentorship," Troy said.
CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia
"In general we are always looking for ways to develop our workforce professionally," a CIA spokesman said in a statement. "Our people are our top priority." The agency declined to comment on the specifics of any personnel management change.
The change is not just about countering China, sources say, which CIA Director Bill Burns has listed as among his top priorities for the agency and has come to dominate public conversation about the agency's future.
"We are very focused on China these days, although I will hasten to add that in all of our conversations about China, we made clear that we are the Central Intelligence Agency, we are not the Chinese Intelligence Agency," Deputy Director David Cohen said at a recent intelligence conference.
But, he added, "what we've come to realize is that we need to really enhance and synchronize our efforts around China."
'A Hard Target'
The Chinese Communist Party is what intelligence professionals call a "hard target" — difficult for the CIA to penetrate, either through digital means or by recruiting human spies.
Current and former intelligence officials say that US intelligence inside China — particularly human intelligence that is the CIA's bread-and-butter — is frustratingly poor, for a myriad of reasons.
The new policy shift, former officials say, could help combat that challenge by building geographical experts over the long term — and helping field them in the right places with the right tradecraft.
"For us, it's important for the overall mission to have expertise in a geographic area or on an issue," Troy said. "You don't acquire that in six months, but over the course of working in a region or on an issue for 10 years or more."
Over the course of several years beginning in 2010, Beijing effectively decimated the CIA's network of recruited agents, killing or imprisoning over a dozen sources over two years, according to The New York Times. Such networks take years to develop and sources say it's unlikely that they have recovered.
Some critics believe that the agency's focus on counterterrorism missions — which became a part of almost every officer's career and often had officers operating from armored convoys in countries where they spoke little of the local language — left its traditional spying chops anemic.
"As the counterterrorism mission expanded, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence assesses that the IC treated traditional intelligence missions as secondary to counterterrorism," said a 2020 report on the intelligence community's abilities to counter China. "The inattention of the 1990s to strategic and emerging threats remained largely unreversed."
Meanwhile, the rapid proliferation of big data and ubiquitous surveillance technology has made the job of intelligence collectors infinitely more difficult. Gone are the days when a CIA operations officer could simply pick up a new passport and assume a new identity in a different country, senior officials have acknowledged publicly.
"China has emerged as our most significant and daunting challenge," said Jennifer Ewbank, the CIA's Deputy Director for Digital Innovation, at a recent intelligence conference. "The plans and intentions of despots and terrorists — the things that have yet to happen — are increasingly more difficult to uncover by traditional means."
CIA Director William Burns testifies during a House Intelligence Committee hearing on October 27, 2021.
Still, senior officials insist the agency has not taken its eye off the ball when it comes to counterterrorism. Burns, speaking on Monday at The Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit, listed China, Russia, Iran and "continuing counterterrorism challenges that we don't get to neglect or walk away from" when asked what keeps him up at night.
The change in how the CIA manages its operations officers is one of many it has undertaken to boost its spying and analysis capabilities targeting China.
The agency recently stood up a "China Mission Center" — the only one focused on only one country, rather than a region of the world. Burns has also said publicly that he is exploring "forward-deploying" China specialists, placing them in countries around the world where the US and China both operate.
In addition to the new mission center, the agency has also added a weekly meeting with the Burns focused exclusively on China, Cohen said at a recent intelligence conference. It is also allocating more of its budget to the problem, Cohen said.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in December that US spy agencies had increased their China-related spending by almost 20 percent in the last fiscal year.
"We need specialists with deep linguistic and operational expertise to drive forward our collection targets," said one former officer who cautioned that they did not have knowledge of the policy change.
"That doesn't mean people shouldn't have different experiences, it just means we have a mission to execute and that doesn't always include what we desire individually."
2. U.S. designates N. Korean defense minister, others for human rights violation
Enforcement, enforcement, enforcement.
(LEAD) U.S. designates N. Korean defense minister, others for human rights violation | Yonhap News Agency
(ATTN: UPDATES with additional information in paras 2-5; CHANGES headline, lead; RESTRUCTURES)
By Byun Duk-kun
WASHINGTON, Dec. 10 (Yonhap) -- The United States on Friday designated North Korea's new Defense Minister Ri Yong-gil and a number of other entities in North Korea, China and Russia for human rights violations.
The U.S. Department of Treasury also designated North Korea's Central Public Prosecutors Office.
Ri, currently serving as North Korea's defense minister, was designated for his role as the former head of minister of social security, which, the department said, uses the court system to "prosecute and punish persons for political wrongdoing in a legal process involving fundamentally unfair trials."
"These trials sometimes end in sentencing to the DPRK's notorious prison camps, run by the Ministry of State Security and the Ministry of Social Security," it added, also noting the death of Otto Warmbier, an American university student who died in 2017 after returning home following a yearlong detention in North Korea.
"The treatment and eventual death of Otto Warmbier, who would have turned 27 years old this year, were reprehensible. The DPRK must continue to be held to account for its abysmal human rights record," the department said.
The department also designated a number of individuals and organizations in China and Russia for violating U.N. Security Council resolutions that prohibit U.N. member states from employing or hosting North Korean workers.
"DPRK nationals often work in other countries, including for the purpose of generating foreign currency earnings that the DPRK can use to support its unlawful weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ballistic missile programs," it said in a press release, referring to North Korea by its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
"UN Security Council resolution 2397, adopted on December 22, 2017, requires UN Member States to have repatriated DPRK nationals earning income in their jurisdictions by December 22, 2019, subject to limited exceptions," it added.
The department noted those illegally employing North Korean workers often contribute to the poor treatment of those workers that include "constant surveillance" and having a significant portion of their wages confiscated by the DPRK regime."
The latest designations were made on the international Human Rights Day.
Those newly designated include the European Institute of Justice, a Russian university based in Moscow, and its provost, Dmitry Yurevich Soin, who, according to the treasury department, "sponsored hundreds of student visas for DPRK construction workers in Russia."
"Some of these workers were affiliated with a DPRK WMD entity, and the revenue they generated from their labor could have been used to support DPRK WMD programs," it said.
The department also designated SEK Studio, a North Korean animation studio with workers in North Korea and China.
"SEK Studio has utilized an assortment of front companies to evade sanctions targeting the Government of the DPRK and to deceive international financial institutions," it said.
Lu Hezheng, a senior employee and former shareholder of Nings Cartoon Studio in China, worked with representatives of SEK Studio to facilitate wire transfers through Nings Cartoon Studio and other front companies in China, according to the department.
The department designated Lu and a range of companies affiliated with him, including Nings Cartoon Studio and Shanghai Hongman Cartoon and Animation Design Studio.
bdk@yna.co.kr
(END)
3. 'I couldn’t kill innocent people': Myanmar soldiers defect to join resistance
I know that we have a number of former military and others working on the problem in Burma (Dave Eubanks and his family leading the Free Burma Rangers is the best known). I am sure some of them are working on the information and influence campaign to support the resistance as well as to degrade the military and achieve effects such as those described below. I am sure they could use some strong international support but most will say there are too many other security problems around the world they are already dealing with.
Excerpts:
The rate of desertion is still relatively low compared to the 350,000 members that still make up the Tatmadaw according to official estimates. Yet every soldier that leaves the military is celebrated as a victory by the resistance.
“The defections have not reached a scale yet that would topple the military. The Tatmadaw’s reaction has been anger and retaliation. The military knows one way, and really one way only – which is use of force to get its way. So, they just double down in what they have always known, which is using more intimidation and abuse to try to keep soldiers in line,” said Phil Robertson. “But each defection helps to raise awareness and it’s possible that continued defections could imperil the military’s leadership.”
Another sign of growing disengagement is the difficulty the Tatmadaw is facing to recruit new members. Independent news site Myanmar NOW reported that multiple retired soldiers and high-ranking officers have been called back to service and threatened with suspended pensions if they refuse.
According to another Burmese news source, The Irrawady, the Burmese army has introduced mandatory military training for the children of military members, effectively creating a reserve force and breaking international humanitarian laws in the process.
'I couldn’t kill innocent people': Myanmar soldiers defect to join resistance
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Yey Int Thwe* remembers July 25 as the day when “everything changed”. The 30-year-old was part of a group of some 10 soldiers forcing their way into homes in southeast Yangon, the capital of Myanmar. As members of the Burmese army, known as the Tatmadaw, they had been tasked with arresting people suspected of organising protests against the February 1 military coup. Armed and carrying handcuffs, Yey Int Thwe found himself face-to-face with his own cousin.
“It was a shock. I spent my childhood with him, and suddenly I was supposed to fight against him and arrest him. For what? Because he dared to express his opinion,” the former soldier told FRANCE 24. “That was the moment I knew I had to leave the army”.
That evening he returned to his barracks and started to devise an exit plan. Now, five months later, he lives in hiding in the jungle near the border between Myanmar and Thailand.
'I joined the army to protect people'
According to Myanmar’s shadow government, the National Unity Government (NUG), 2,000 soldiers have defected from the military and joined the ranks of the opposition since February’s coup led by Min Aung Hlaing.
“The Tatmadaw has never been more hated than now in Myanmar,” Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Asia Division, told FRANCE 24. Every year members of the army defect because they are dissatisfied with their living and work conditions. But this time there is an added moral crisis: Soldiers do not want to support the junta anymore.
Many defectors are motivated by a refusal to turn their weapons on the people of Myanmar as the country heads towards civil war. Since February, 1,300 civilians have been killed by Burmese security forces according to local activist group Assistance Action for Political Prisoners (AAPP). A UN commissioner found evidence of "violations that may amount to crimes against humanity or war crimes" perpetrated by the military.
“In 2015 I was making sure that voting booths were secure, for the elections which allowed Aung San Suu Kyi to be democratically elected. In 2021, the military is shooting at her defenders. I can’t stand the military killing people,” said Kaung Htet Aung* in an interview with FRANCE 24. He added, “I joined the army to protect the people of Myanmar, not to fight against them.”
At 29, after having spent nine years serving as a sergeant, he also left the Tatmadaw and joined the civil disobedience movement. Doing so meant taking a huge risk. "Soldiers don’t have the right to quit their positions, it’s a job for life," he said. "Desertion is punishable by imprisonment, or worse. Then there’s the risk of retaliation against our loved ones."
'The only way to end this is by force'
His path out of the military was riddled with danger. On May 6 the young soldier escaped his military base, but not for long. Just hours later he was injured while riding a motorbike and recaptured. His punishment was three months in military prison. In August, the junta granted him a second chance and offered him his old military job back, but he ran away again.
This time he was helped by People’s Soldiers, an organisation of former members of the military now helping would-be deserters work out the logistics of their escape. "As soon as I got out of prison I made contact with them through social media," Kaung Htet Aung said. "A few weeks later they helped me make my escape."
"It all happens on social media," a spokesperson for the group told FRANCE 24. "Soldiers or their loved ones contact us. As soon as we verify their information, we get them a bus ticket to bring them to free zones." The free zones are areas near the border controlled not by the junta, but by armed ethnic groups. Once escapees arrive, People’s Soldiers helps them find accommodation and provides other basic necessities.
“I am so happy to be free,” said Kaung Htet Aung, smiling as he spoke to FRANCE 24 despite the deluge of rain beating down on his makeshift shelter. Now he is helping the resistance using skills and knowledge he learned in the army. “I made weapons for the Tatmadaw, and today I make weapons to fight against them. I also teach young people who have just joined the militia how to use them.”
“The only way we are going to end this is by force,” he added.
Developing communications
Providing practical help is not the only objective of People’s Soldiers – the organisation is also heavily invested in communications campaigns to encourage those still serving in the Tatmadaw to switch sides.
Every Sunday at 10am sharp, the group broadcasts video conferences on social media covering different subjects each week, with speakers including members of the NUG, representatives from the pro-democracy movement and former-soldiers who have already deserted. These discussions are only part of the group's efforts to flood social media with its message and even send direct messages to members of the military and their loved ones.
“This propaganda plays a major role,” said Phil Robertson. “It doesn’t only reassure those who are thinking of deserting, but also adds pressure and encourages them to take the leap.” It is also endorsed by the NUG who since September has itself been calling on soldiers to join the resistance and promising safety for those who do desert.
It was through such messages that Yey Int Thwe’s sister was able to get in touch with the organisation, when he could not. “The Tatmadaw knows that People’s Soldiers exists. To stop soldiers contacting members of the organisation, they monitor our phones very closely,” he said.
“My sister found out the group existed thanks to one of their online meetings. She sent them a message, then she told me the location I needed go to in order to escape to a free zone” he added.
Today he is helping the organisation by building houses in the jungle for future defectors to live in. “I live thanks to donations made to People’s Soldiers, and I spend my days cutting bamboo,” he says.
Although he feels safe now, Yey Int Thwe hopes for his family to come and live with him. “The whole time I was running away, they were scared for me. Now I’m the one who’s scared for them. I’m scared that they are going to face the consequences for my decision.”
Retired soldiers returning to service
The rate of desertion is still relatively low compared to the 350,000 members that still make up the Tatmadaw according to official estimates. Yet every soldier that leaves the military is celebrated as a victory by the resistance.
“The defections have not reached a scale yet that would topple the military. The Tatmadaw’s reaction has been anger and retaliation. The military knows one way, and really one way only – which is use of force to get its way. So, they just double down in what they have always known, which is using more intimidation and abuse to try to keep soldiers in line,” said Phil Robertson. “But each defection helps to raise awareness and it’s possible that continued defections could imperil the military’s leadership.”
Another sign of growing disengagement is the difficulty the Tatmadaw is facing to recruit new members. Independent news site Myanmar NOW reported that multiple retired soldiers and high-ranking officers have been called back to service and threatened with suspended pensions if they refuse.
According to another Burmese news source, The Irrawady, the Burmese army has introduced mandatory military training for the children of military members, effectively creating a reserve force and breaking international humanitarian laws in the process.
“The junta needs to understand that even within its ranks, some people don’t support it anymore,” said Yey Int Thwe. “It has to return power to the people and we need to start a huge military reform. The army needs to return to its original purpose: protecting the people.”
*The names of some of these interviewees were changed to protect their identity.
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4. Russian Propaganda Brags of Putin’s Military Blackmail Against the U.S.
Excerpt:
Host Olga Skabeeva expressed her hope that the escalating tensions wouldn’t ultimately lead to nuclear war, but quickly reiterated Putin’s earlier assertion that if that were to happen, the Russians “will go to heaven, as martyrs,” while the other side will simply die. Zhirinovsky retorted: “That’s exactly what is going to happen.” Grimacing, Skabeeva replied: “I hope not. I would like to live a while longer.”
Russian Propaganda Brags of Putin’s Military Blackmail Against the U.S.
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Photos Getty
Before U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin sat down for a virtual summit on Tuesday morning, Russian state media broadcast its own predictions about the goals of the meeting—and the outcome of the talks.
The latest Russian media tirades have made one point very clear: that gone are the days when Putin’s Russia sought to be treated as an equal with the West. Today, the Kremlin strives to dictate its terms to the world’s leading superpower, using military blackmail to make a point.
The U.S. recently revealed its intelligence assessments that Russia could be planning to invade Ukraine as soon as early 2022. This data has been shared with EU and NATO allies, bringing them up-to-date on Moscow’s ongoing military scheme. On Sunday’s state TV show Vesti Nedeli, notorious propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov scoffed at Biden’s statement about not recognizing Russia’s “red lines” when it comes to Ukraine, and predicted that over the course of the summit, Putin will snap Biden “back to reality.”
Kiselyov claimed that by signing the U.S.-Russia Presidential Joint Statement on Strategic Stability in June of this year, Biden essentially acknowledged that he “does not want the United States to be reduced to radioactive ash.” The statement read, in part: “Today, we reaffirm the principle that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
“Here it is: the red line for Biden, set by Putin,” Kiselyov exclaimed. He declared that Biden’s cooperation revealed “America’s fears” and the U.S.’s recognition of Russia’s nuclear “trump card.”
On the state TV show Sunday Evening with Vladimir Soloviev this weekend, the host and his panelists did their best to lower expectations for the meeting.
“This will be a difficult and strained summit,” Soloviev predicted. Andrey Sidorov, deputy dean of world politics at Moscow State University, concurred. “They [Biden and Putin] won’t be able to reach any agreements,” Sidorov said. “All of this is leading to the disintegration of Europe… the [U.S.] won’t be able to expand their military forces to Cold War levels, because they have to contain China.” He added: “Ukraine will be the main topic of conversation on December 7, and the main source of contention, because we can’t agree on anything.”
Sidorov went on to argue that nothing good can come out of the summit, since the United States and Russia don’t recognize each other’s red lines. Soloviev followed up: “What then, war?” Sidorov replied: “We’re already waging it. It’s ongoing.” He went on: “We should have taken all of Ukraine back in 2014. If there was no Ukraine, there would be no problem.”
“Don’t play with fire. Don’t mess with us.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov contributed his own gloomy outlook in the run-up to the summit. On Monday, he told reporters that it was important not to anticipate any breakthroughs and cautioned the public against developing any “emotional” expectations. Peskov added that Putin isn’t planning to provide any public statements at the conclusion of his exchange with the U.S. president.
The attitude of belligerence and hostility permeated state media’s hot takes on the meeting. The head of the State Duma Committee on Defense, Andrei Kartapolov, mocked Biden’s dismissal of Putin’s red lines: “Let him try to cross them... The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation remain in a state of military readiness and are ready to carry out any orders of our commander-in-chief. Makes no difference to us how many of their [U.S.] advisers are there.” He compared the situation with Ukraine to Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008 and cautioned: “Don’t play with fire. Don’t mess with us.”
Appearing on the state TV show 60 Minutes on Monday, Igor Korotchenko, member of the Russian Defense Ministry’s Public Council and editor-in-chief of the National Defense magazine, nervously addressed the possibility that new U.S. sanctions against Russia might include disconnecting Russia from the SWIFT international payment system. Korotchenko threatened: “Disconnection of Russia from SWIFT, if that happens, I believe should be considered as a declaration of war against us—and acted upon accordingly. À la guerre comme à la guerre.”
Notorious nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia in the State Duma, was invited to participate in last Thursday’s broadcast of 60 Minutes. Known for his deliberately provocative statements, Zhirinovsky delivered another outrageous diatribe. “The smell of war is in the air,” he asserted, warning the West: “Stop yapping in the direction of Russia.” Zhirinovsky predicted: “We will meet the new year 2022 with a smile on our face, while NATO, Ukraine and others will be trembling in anticipation of war. If Ukrainians start it, we will destroy them.”
Host Olga Skabeeva expressed her hope that the escalating tensions wouldn’t ultimately lead to nuclear war, but quickly reiterated Putin’s earlier assertion that if that were to happen, the Russians “will go to heaven, as martyrs,” while the other side will simply die. Zhirinovsky retorted: “That’s exactly what is going to happen.” Grimacing, Skabeeva replied: “I hope not. I would like to live a while longer.”
5. A white supremacist march in D.C. was pushed by a fake Twitter account, experts say
As an aside I wonder how long it will be before law enforcement and intelligence agencies will use fake social media accounts to organize activities such as this to flesh out members of subversive organizations on the extreme right AND extreme left.
Maybe the threat of law enforcement adopting such a practice will deter people from becoming victims of social media disinformation and propaganda and manipulation.
A white supremacist march in D.C. was pushed by a fake Twitter account, experts say
The new Twitter account looked like it came from a smiling blond woman who lives in D.C., retweeting neighborhood news about a Thanksgiving giveaway, a bald eagle sighting and bike lanes near Lincoln Park.
She wrote in her bio that she was a journalist who recently got a dog and loved avocados. She included the hashtag “#DCStatehood.”
Then she finally sent the first tweet of her own: “HAPPENING NOW,” she wrote on Saturday. “About 500 men with riot shields are marching in #WashingtonDC.”
But this was not just a march on the National Mall, a common occurrence in a city accustomed to protests. The men were part of Patriot Front, a white supremacist group that rebranded after one of its members plowed his car into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville in August 2017, killing anti-racism protester Heather Heyer. And the Twitter account that announced the march wasn’t real, anti-hate group and disinformation researchers say.
The small march — about 100 people — and the attention it generated, experts said, displayed the ways hate groups such as Patriot Front use the nation’s capital as a backdrop for propaganda materials and manipulate social media to their advantage.
“It shows how a small troupe of fascists in uniform can … exploit the loopholes around a social media company like Twitter and absolutely make themselves look much more fearsome, look much more scary,” said Michael Edison Hayden, senior investigative reporter and spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, “and give themselves a much better shot at getting the mainstream coverage they so desperately crave.”
The group did not have a permit, according to National Park Service spokesman Mike Litterst.
After the brief march, the Twitter account became overtly fascist, changing the display name to “Reclaim America” followed by a link to the websites of Patriot Front and another neo-Nazi propaganda site. The account is now suspended. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
“Our nation’s capital, the optics of it are compelling. It’s about the entire country as opposed to any one community,” said Oren Segal, vice president of the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League. “It’s very possible that Patriot Front will use the backdrop of the Capitol again in the future.”
The group also staged a march in Philadelphia on July 4 and one in Pittsburgh last month, according to SITE Intelligence Group, which studies online extremism. But on Saturday, they traveled from Virginia to the Mall, passing the Lincoln Memorial and marching to the U.S. Capitol, where its leader, Thomas Ryan Rousseau, gave a speech.
D.C. police confirmed that the Patriot Front group marched from Virginia to the Capitol and that officers monitored the protest to “ensure the demonstration remained peaceful.” There were no incidents or arrests, police said.
Rousseau, who grew up in the Dallas suburbs, participated in the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville as a leader with Vanguard America. That group was one of the defendants in a recent federal civil trial. The jury listened to a deposition from Rousseau and specifically ordered Vanguard America to pay $1 million in punitive damages.
On Saturday, Rousseau and his men in khakis marched again, holding a banner that read “VICTORY OR DEATH.” They wore white neck gaiters to cover their faces, with many also wearing sunglasses, hats, brown boots and knee pads, according to videos posted in far-right chat rooms. They held shields and American flags, including some that were turned upside down on poles.
Their chants of “Reclaim America” over the weekend were similar to the 2017 torch-rally call in Charlottesville of “Jews will not replace us!” both stemming from the “Great Replacement Theory,” the conspiratorial idea of an engineered demographic replacement of White Christians that is frequently repeated by right-wing pundits such as Fox News’s Tucker Carlson.
“What we saw in D.C. was an extension of an effort to remind Americans that the fight against white supremacy isn’t over,” Segal said. “We can’t just sit back and rest after a Charlottesville case. We can’t just sit back and rest after white supremacists are de-platformed. We have to recognize that the battle against white supremacists continues.”
Rousseau could not be reached.
A post-Charlottesville rebrand
Patriot Front’s name is an attempt to make its message more palatable to the masses after its group was associated with the Charlottesville murder.
Rousseau led members of Vanguard America in the streets of Charlottesville in 2017. Pre-march messages presented during the recent federal trial indicated that many in the group came for and plotted violence. Among those was James Alex Fields Jr., a neo-Nazi who marched with Vanguard before plowing his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing Heyer.
Afterward, realizing it was detrimental to be associated with Charlottesville, Rousseau and his followers broke off, founding Patriot Front. The change came during upheaval in what was then the “alt-right” movement, as overwhelming public opinion condemned the neo-Nazis marching on the streets.
Since then, white supremacist groups have argued over the most effective way to spread their hateful messaging. For Patriot Front, that has mostly been through distributing fliers and posters.
There were more than 5,000 cases of white supremacist propaganda in 2020, a near doubling from the prior year, the ADL found. The Patriot Front accounted for more than 80 percent.
Their messaging includes the American colors of red, white and blue and a manifesto with photos of Founding Fathers, including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, in a warped view of patriotism that calls for an all-White ethno-state.
Although the group proudly declares its beliefs online, members hide their identities and use more stealth tactics, said Megan Squire, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center. This came after anti-fascist activists identified many neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville through photos and crowdsourcing on social media.
If Rousseau does plan a rally, it is often unannounced, such as the one in D.C. over the weekend. Members cover their faces to avoid being doxed, or having their identities publicly revealed, and even refrain from telling others their real names. And Squire said Rousseau has set up multiple different chats after a hack of the main Unite the Right rally planning server was used as evidence in court.
This paranoia came after the public blowback to the Unite the Right rally, Squire said, showing the ways hate groups and leaders like Rousseau took some lessons from four years ago and apply them today.
“None of that happened until the massive public blowback after Unite the Right,” said Squire, also a computer science professor at Elon University who studies right-wing extremism. “They’re scared and they’re prioritizing security over recruitment, security over propaganda. And they’re sort of marginalized now and having to do these kind of tiny little stealth rallies.”
Organizing for optics
At least 1,500 people retweeted the fake account “reporting” of the march, according to an archive of the Twitter account. The message was amplified — and in that way, experts said, it was a success.
At the same time, the media arm of another white supremacist organization embedded with Rousseau’s group. They shot videos and posted them in far-right chat rooms.
“Thomas, why are we marching in D. C.?" the person behind the camera asked.
“Our demonstrations are an exhibition of our unified capability to organize, to show our strength not as brawlers or public nuisances,” Rousseau replied, “but as men capable of illustrating a message and seeking an America that more closely resembles the interest of its true people.”
On Telegram, a social media app favored by far-right extremists, Patriot Front called their members “activists” and touted their ability to march “across the Potomac, through Washington DC … with peaceful and orderly conduct before their full, safe departure.”
Rousseau’s supporters, including Mike Peinovich, more commonly known by his pseudonym “Mike Enoch,” a popular far-right podcast host, praised the rally. But many other right-wing figures had their doubts.
They alleged, without evidence, the men with their faces covered were actually federal agents and the entire rally was an FBI trap, experts said, illustrating the true failure of the propaganda effort: The very people they hoped to recruit doubted the event was even real.
6. FB's struggle with Gateway Pundit highlights challenge of containing disinformation
FB's struggle with Gateway Pundit highlights challenge of containing disinformation - ET BrandEquity
The Gateway Pundit, a far-right news site, has used its Facebook page - with more than 630,000 followers - to post bogus stories alleging the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. Some commenters responded with threats of violence.
After Gateway Pundit posted a June story on Facebook that included debunked claims of voter fraud in Arizona, a commenter said the governor and secretary of state should be "fed feet first through a woodchipper." A story featuring false claims of vote-rigging in Fulton County, Georgia, drew comments on Facebook calling for an election worker to be hanged or "shot for treason."
For years, Facebook has imposed sanctions on Gateway Pundit's account to limit the spread of its misinformation. But Gateway Pundit still uses its Facebook page to amplify its reporting and raise money: The page features a prominent appeal asking readers to buy subscriptions to support its "battle for survival."
Gateway Pundit's continuing presence on Facebook illustrates the platform's worldwide struggle to stop the spread of disinformation and to balance content-policing with free-speech concerns. Facebook has taken a barrage of criticism this year from critics and a company whistleblower who say its practices stoke anger and division to increase user engagement.
In a statement to Reuters, Facebook said it seeks to label misinformation and "reduce its spread." The company uses fact checkers and artificial intelligence to identify false or misleading material and warns readers who try to share it. Facebook partners with about 80 organizations, including Reuters, to independently fact-check content that appears on its site.
Facebook said repeat offenders, such as the Gateway Pundit, are subject to tougher sanctions, including having their posts pushed to the bottom of users' news feeds (the lists of posts they see), and being barred from Facebook's content-promotion services.
But Facebook almost never removes the offending posts or shuts down the pages - that happens only in rare circumstances, such as posts pushing COVID misinformation, the company says. Sites that directly threaten violence also may be shut down, but account holders are not held responsible for comments on their pages.
Twitter has taken a more aggressive approach with Gateway Pundit, permanently suspending the @gatewaypundit account of Jim Hoft, the site's founder and editor, as well as the account of his twin brother, Joe Hoft, a writer.
Jim Hoft declined a request for comment; Joe Hoft did not respond to comment requests.
Facebook and Twitter both have been blasted by right-leaning politicians for what they call censorship of conservative voices. Jim Hoft testified in a 2018 congressional hearing that his site's traffic from Facebook had tanked after the platform imposed restrictions on the spread of the Pundit's content, saying such sanctions make "book burning" look benign.
Yet Gateway Pundit's traffic has boomed: In the wake of the 2020 election, it peaked at nearly 50 million visits a month, according to one estimate, illustrating the power of viral disinformation. Reuters found the site's often-debunked election-fraud claims were cited in about 100 of more than 800 threatening or harassing messages sent to election officials since last November.
Facebook has long recognized Gateway Pundit as a source of false and divisive content. A July 2019 internal report on "potential misinformation and polarization risks" listed the site as one of Facebook's "common misinfo offenders." The report was among a cache of documents provided to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Congress by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager who left the company in May and has been a leading public critic of its practices.
Reuters identified a dozen Gateway Pundit stories on Facebook that contained baseless election-fraud claims, two of which Facebook labeled as containing false information. Under four of those stories, nine Facebook users called for the execution of election workers or officials. Only one of those four stories was flagged by Facebook for containing false information.
In August, Gateway Pundit reported that a Milwaukee official had been threatened after being featured in Pundit stories alleging voter fraud. The result? Even more threats. On the site's Facebook page, one reader commented: "There is only one punishment acceptable for traitors, being drawn and quartered."
7. 'Elevating' hidden ideas: Inside the Army's Dragon's Lair invention contest
'Elevating' hidden ideas: Inside the Army's Dragon's Lair invention contest - Breaking Defense
“Ideas are out there,” Col. Joe Buccino said, referring to the 2 million-plus people who serve in the military. “It's just a matter of finding them.”
Spc. Johnathan King demonstrates a new gunner restraint system for M88s at Dragon’s Lair. (Courtesy of US Army)
FORT BRAGG, N.C.: At the front of the operations center, a Coast Guard representative pointed a digital thermometer at a ballistic vest rigged with a cooling system, calling out the falling temperature of the pack as cold water flowed through it.
The temperature of the pack dropped from 71 degrees to about 52 degrees in 20 seconds, proving that Air Force 1st Lt. Justin O’Brien’s prototype for an armored cooling vest has merit.
The value of such a system is obvious for an Army that frequently finds itself in hot climes, whether its the deserts of the Middle East or just here in Fort Bragg in the summer — not least to Lt. Gen. Michael Kurilla, commander of the XVIII Airborne Corps.
The idea, Kurilla said, has “tremendous potential,” even if he’s skeptical about how it would work in places where soldiers don’t have ready access to ice to fuel the system.
“There are [more] tests that need to be done,” O’Brien acknowledged.
Kurilla’s words had weight because he, like the Coast Guard representative, served as a panelist at the most recent Dragon’s Lair event, the Army’s XVIII Airborne Corps innovation competition styled after ABC’s hit show “Shark Tank.”
But instead of presenting new business opportunities to a panel of uber-rich, sometimes snarky business titans, servicemembers showcase innovative projects — developed in their spare time with the hope of improving the lives of soldiers — to a panel of judges from across the joint force, industry and academia.
“It is about elevating ideas that are trapped somewhere in an organization,” Kurilla said during the awards ceremony.
Set in an operations center at Fort Bragg, the XVIII Airborne Corps hosted its most recent Dragon’s Lair innovation competition on Dec. 6. Breaking Defense was invited to sit in on event, the sixth iteration — or “episode” — since the effort began in Fall 2020.
For years, military leaders have said that innovators lie within the ranks of the over 2 million active duty and reserve troops, but the Pentagon has struggled to identify that talent or give soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines a forum to show off their best ideas.
So, at Fort Bragg this week, soldiers, sailors and airmen pitched a range of projects aimed at everything from increasing digital efficiency of the military to saving soldier’s lives on the battlefield. This was the first time of the competition that included participants from across the military services and joint panelists. The sixth episode received over 100 proposals, narrowing those down to eight finalists. (The creator of one finalist proposal wasunable to attend.)
While the seven ideas presented spanned technical maturity, the competition ended in a three-way tie for the first time in Dragon’s Lair history, between the novel cooling system, a new restraint born out of tragedy and a digital model to help in urban warfare. Though the winners get a four-day pass, their pick of an Army training school and a Meritorious Service Medal, the next step is for the Army to prove the projects can work in the wild.
“We are at the moment developing a glide path for full implementation across the corps for each winning innovation,” said Col. Joe Buccino, spokesperson for the XVIII Airborne Corps.
‘A Problem Here That Needed To Be Solved’
After nearly two decades of the war in the Middle East and nearly three centuries of training in America’s deep south, the joint force is still on the lookout for solutions for combating heat exhaustion.
“As an officer, the members of my team were also suffering the same … heat burdens that I relate to and I thought that there’s a way that we could attack this,” O’Brien told Breaking Defense in an interview after his presentation. “There’s a problem here that needed to be solved.”
O’Brien, who described himself as “engineer-minded,” pointed to the summertime temperatures soldiers face at Fort Bragg, which hits 90 degrees daily, plus humidity. In 2020, there were 1,667 cases of heat illness, including 475 heat strikes among active duty military.
Air Force 1st Lt. Justin O’Brien demonstrates his armored cooling system at Dragon’s Lair. (Courtesy of US Army)
O’Brien’s solution looks similar to a CamelBak and is worn like a backpack, but with a chill pad on the inside of the vest. The system is designed to be integrated into ballistic plate carriers and is rigged so ice water flows from the water pouch into the pad, cooling the soldier’s torso. The prototype can produce cool temperatures for up to 14 hours, according to O’Brien. And in tests in 2019, he said the cooling system reduced the temperature of the vest by 31 degrees.
The battlefield limitation, of course, is what happens after 14 hours and when troops don’t have access to ice. O’Brien said the vest can still provide “significant cooling” with water from a drinking fountain, but requires further testing to see how it can work with warmer water.
Even if the cooling doesn’t work with hotter temperatures, the overall system still has benefits, O’Brien said. For instance, it also has a pressurized water line so users can irrigate wounds or fill up canteens.
O’Brien said he came to Dragon’s Lair hoping for “advocacy” for his prototype, currently at what’s called technology readiness level 6, to receive more testing and personnel. Being among the winners is a “huge step forward” for the product, he said.
“What we want now is, we have to develop them a little bit more to get more robust prototypes,” O’Brien said. “And once we’re there we hope to send it to the Army, have them field it, that have them break it and find the weak points, figure out what the members actually want, what they don’t, adapt our system and hopefully come out on the backside with a really solid product that we can approach the industry with.”
According to Buccino, AFWERX, the Air Force’s rapid innovation organization, is interested in O’Brien’s prototype.
A Harness To Save Lives In Rollovers
Another winning project was fairly simple, but potentially critical to soldier safety: a restraint system on a Vietnam-era vehicle to protect gunners in the event of a roll-over.
The idea for the project developed out of tragedy. A few years ago, Sgt. 1st Class Keenan Millay lost a fellow soldier during a vehicle rollover incident. Since then, Millay said “it was personal” to him that vehicles his soldiers sat in had restraint systems to protect them.
When he arrived at Fort Knox, he discovered the M88s in his platoon weren’t outfitted with a gunner restraint system.
“It was obvious, we were gonna have to change that,” Millay told Breaking Defense after Dragon’s Lair.
(From left to right) Sergeant 1st Class Keenan Millay, Spc. Johnathan King and Staff Sgt. Carter Casey, start their presentation on the M88 Gunner Restraint System at Dragon’s Lair. (Courtesy of US Army)
After teaming up with fellow soldiers Staff Sgt. Carter Casey and Spc. Johnathan King, Millay scoured the Army inventory and discovered there wasn’t a restraint system made for the M88. Beyond that, the team also realized that the M88 turret was designed so the gunner had to lean out of the hatch or sit on top of it to have full line of sight when firing — further decreasing safety in a rollover. To address this, the team added a 14.25-inch extension to the turret mount, while bolting down a new gunner restraint system inside the vehicle.
The soldiers told the judges panel that they didn’t have a patent; they had just made the adjustment to improve safety.
Kurilla praised the soldiers for making “common sense” changes to save lives. Their solution could now be implemented across the hundreds of M88s in the service’s inventory and the safety office at Army headquarters is interested in the product.
“The biggest win for us right now is that this is going to get fielded throughout the Army,” Millay said. “We did not do this for any accolades involved in this or any recognition. We did this to save other soldiers and that was it. We didn’t know about Dragon’s Lair until our commander put us in for this.”
Dragon’s Lair Revives Stalled Digital Project
In his spare time, 2nd Lt. Christian Relleve of the Army Reserves developed an artificial intelligence/machine learning project designed to predict the interior floor plans of buildings based on their external architecture.
But unsure where to pitch it, Relleve stopped working on it about a year ago. Then came Dragon’s Lair.
“When I heard about the opportunity to do Dragon’s Lair, I was like, ‘Oh, wow, maybe I can revive this,’” Relleve told Breaking Defense.
Relleve said that a building’s external structure can provide insight into the building’s interior layout. For example, he noted that large windows on the side of a building likely mark an office, while small windows likely indicate a bathroom.
2nd Lt. Christian Relleve presents is floor plan prediction software. (Courtesy of US Army)
His presentation listed numerous benefits of the technology, including improving urban warfare planning, rehearsals and reducing civilian deaths. Additionally, the software could assist commanders in developing courses of action and improve soldier situational awareness ahead of the mission.
“Readiness will be a lot better in terms of what to expect once they’re about to do a mission that involves going inside the building,” said Relleve, an architect for the Navy in his civilian life. “And I think if soldiers are extremely familiar with what they’re going to be expecting, they’ll be more ready.”
In practical use, the AI/ML solution would be paired with an architecture subject matter expert, such as Relleve, to help analyze more difficult structures that don’t have a pattern. The algorithm would be able to largely identify the interior structure of symmetrical buildings and buildings in clusters that are likely to have similar interiors. Asymmetrical buildings would require help from another SME. In his presentation, Relleve estimated that with proper resources his project could be completed in one year.
Judges encouraged Relleve to expand beyond his current idea for mission planning and think about how it could potentially integrate live video feeds onto soldier augmented reality glasses in the future. Relleve said that’s “definitely” a future possibility as the capability matures.
“Now that I know that I have the support from the Army, I’m more motivated to continue this,” Relleve said. “I’ll take all the opportunities that they’ll provide me to make sure this becomes a reality within the next one or two years.”
Relleve said his idea could also be relevant to other three-letter agencies such as the National Reconnaissance Office. Buccino told Breaking Defense that the service is working to find an external agency to partner with Relleve.
Moving forward, Buccino said they would like to see participation in Dragon’s Lair continue to grow, potentially incorporating industry and academia.
“Ideas are out there,” Buccino said. “It’s just a matter of finding them.”
8. Why Is China Insisting It Is a Democracy?
The question is what kind of social contract is more legitimate? (I would say it is not democracy with Chinese characteristics). And is the CCP's attempt to frame itself as a democracy an acknowledgement that democracy is more legitimate?
Why Is China Insisting It Is a Democracy?
The attempt to frame an alternative model of democracy highlights a shift in the CCP’s quest for legitimacy.
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Just ahead of U.S. President Joe Biden’s Summit for Democracy, the Chinese State Council Information Office published a whitepaper outlining its distinctive conception of democracy. Much of China’s recent emphasis upon democracy – through an alternative discourse that deviates considerably from the West’s – should be read in light of the wider context of the country’s search for a plausible and emphatic legitimation narrative.
Legitimation narratives are the set of discourses and argumentation advanced by states as justification for the normative legitimacy of their rule over their territories and citizens. Such narratives have both domestic and foreign audiences – domestic, in the sense of persuading citizens at large to accept their rule; foreign, in deflecting and pushing back against challenges to the state’s territorial sovereignty and claim to political authority.
Such narratives manifest in many forms: The United States has historically centered its regime around the dual notions of freedom and democracy. The British bicameral system, coupled with a constitutional monarchical framework, emphasizes representation and checks and balances. Singapore, on the other hand, prizes meritocracy and quality governance as the fundamental lynchpin to its rule. Legitimation narratives bolster regime strength and continuity, heighten popular buy-in and support, and provide compelling reasons for individuals to refrain from secessionist activities.
The Chinese state is no exception in its search for legitimacy, but the legitimation narratives employed by Beijing have shifted and evolved during the post-reform and opening-up period (1978 onwards).
The Ebbs and Flows of Post-reform China’s Legitimation Narrative
By the time of Deng Xiaoping’s ascent to the zenith of political power in China, he was presented with a country of over 980 million people, an economy ravished by decades of internal turmoil and upheaval, and a generation of youth starved of education due to the Cultural Revolution. Given political constraints, Deng was compelled to reinterpret Marxist-Leninist doctrines in a manner that would justify both rapid economic development and the continued political survival of the Chinese Communist Party (see Zhang Weiwei’s commentary on Deng thought in 1996).
Deng viewed his regime’s legitimation narrative as primarily ends-driven – to solve some of the most pressing socioeconomic problems confronting the Chinese people, especially those victimized and traumatized by a system that recognized no profits and individual innovation. “Let some people get rich first,” Deng declared, inaugurating what Yuan Yuan Ang calls China’s Gilded Age. The key to this, he decided, rested with an ultra-pragmatic outlook that contained three strands: first, the view that socialism remained the ultimate objective of China’s politico-economic trajectory, and that all reforms must be undertaken with this end goal in mind; second, the prescription that ideological purity must be temporarily superseded by development – at the hands of a consolidated state in politics, and an empowered market in economics (which critics have subsequently termed a precursor to the neoliberal/neo-authoritarian split amongst 1990s Chinese intelligentsia), and third, the insistence that China would benefit most from harmonization and cultivation of ties with the outside world – perhaps best epitomized by the Special Economic Zones and economic liberalization implemented across coastal areas.
Deng’s successor, Jiang Zemin, inherited the reformist mantle, despite the fact that he had started out with a broadly conservative bent. Through his flagship Three Represents theory (a vision that current Politburo Standing Committee member Wang Huning also played a part in developing), Jiang championed a representative relationship between party-state and people – the state was due to represent the development trend of China’s advanced productive forces (including its industrialists and entrepreneurs), the orientation of the country’s culture, and the “fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people.” The shift toward representation and incorporation of the middle and capitalist classes into the denizens served by the Communist Party was reconciled with the conventional Maoist ideal of “vanguard of the proletariat” through the creative stretching of what the “proletariat” comprised. Under Jiang, China’s legitimation narrative evolved into one propelled by the party serving as a proxy for the interests of the majority. Correspondingly, despite the lack of democratic elections in the upper echelons of the regime, the 1990s under Jiang and 2000s (the Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao era) saw considerable experimentation with village elections on the municipal and local level.
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Hu’s era marked a watershed moment – it featured a hybrid legitimation narrative that paved the way for the present state of normative discourse in China. In the early years of their tenure, Hu and Wen placed a heavy premium on “societal harmony” and stability and a scientific approach to social management – perhaps unsurprising, given their technocratic backgrounds. Much of this should be read as a continuation of Jiang’s account of representation, albeit with a distinctly more preservative bent: the focus was on maintaining order, preserving stability, while advancing development. Order and representation collectively rendered the regime legitimate.
Democracy With Chinese Characteristics?
Yet to portray Hu and Wen as merely a status quo-preserving pair would be to do them significant disservice. Both openly complied with norms concerning succession as set out by Deng Xiaoping; both also emphasized, toward the tail end of their rule, the need for more stable mechanisms that ensure the maintenance of meritocratic, high-quality rule. The state was not only a guarantor of stability, but also of effective, meritorious, and virtuous governance. Means of achieving that goal could well include – as noted by Yu Keping, author of the essay “Democracy Is A Good Thing” and a prominent theorist who closely advised Hu – a gradual yet genuine shift toward more suffrage and electoral enfranchisement in the country.
Xi Jinping’s first term sparked a marked shift toward making meritocracy front and foremost a critical component of China’s legitimation narrative. Respected and preeminent theorists – both within and outside the party – turned toward constructing what they take to be a reasonable interpretation of the “China Model.” Among them, Canadian Scholar Daniel Bell’s stand-out account offers a lucid and comprehensive exposition of a system of governance underpinned by fair, competitive examinations that rewarded the talented and virtuous – effectively the modern Chinese way of doing things, sans its deficiencies and flaws, which Bell himself notes to be persisting (although improving) in certain quarters.
In Xi Jinping Thought, merit is to be understood dynamically – not just in terms of technical expertise or political skillsets, but also in terms of resonance with the people. Indeed, as set out at the 19th Party Congress in 2017, a core tenet undergirding Xi’s expectations for party members is that Chinese governance must be “people-centered.” Merit is to be measured not by the elite, but by the masses. Here, Xi draws heavily upon the Maoist ideal of the “mass line” – the masses are both the originators and receptors of the government’s mandate, and merit is measured in terms of whomever can best fulfil the needs of the public.
All of the above is to say that we should not be surprised by the recent surge in discourses concerning democracy propagated by the Chinese state. “Democracy with Chinese characteristics” is but a logical end-product that draws upon a mixture of Jiang’s emphasis upon representation, Hu and Wen’s insistence of stability and harmony taking precedent over competing demands, and Xi’s fusion of Mao’s emphasis upon the masses with a more top-down, centralized account of Chinese meritocracy. It is neither a recent concoction that spontaneously erupted, nor an ideology that is fundamentally disjointed from its predecessors.
What does this brand of democracy entail? First, it is primarily outcome- and results-driven, often without granting comparable weighting or consideration to questions of procedural legitimacy – e.g. how inclusive, open, or contested are the procedures employed to arrive at the outcomes? The newly coined notion “whole-process people’s democracy” replaces the more typical criteria measuring processual democracy (e.g. enfranchisement and suffrage rates) with a holistic measurement of whether people’s lives are materially and substantively improved. To put it bluntly, it is consequentialist, and arguably exclusively so. As economist Eric Li has repeatedly proclaimed, the Chinese system works, for it is adaptive, meritocratic, and – as a result – frequently attains high levels of satisfaction and approval from its denizens.
Second, Xi’s conception of democracy with Chinese characteristics is centered around the poor and excluded – including many who, in his view, had been shut out of the exclusive circles that benefited from the country’s astronomical economic growth over the past decades. From the crackdown on big tech, to anti-graft and -corruption campaigns, to his calls for “common prosperity” – setting aside (for now) questions of efficacy and genuine intentions – Xi Jinping Thought clearly has far greater appetite and room for socialist and redistributionist thought, as compared with his predecessors.
In practice, the extent to which this view of democracy is compatible with conventional Western understanding of the term is likely to be minimal. Observers may see an undergirding commonality in the importance accorded to the “demos” – the people – but that’s where the similarities end. While cynics are likely to dismiss this account as a propagandistic innovation, its advocates would be expected to vociferously proclaim that such deviation from the Western-influenced norm is precisely the point.
The Expanding Audience Theory: From Domestic to Global
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What could explain this gradual yet contiguous transition in official ideology – from Deng’s “it doesn’t matter if it’s a white cat or black cat, so long as it’s a cat that catches rats” brand of pragmatism, to Jiang’s all-encompassing, co-optation-heavy “Three Represents,” to Hu’s prizing of political stability and hierarchal order, to, finally, Xi’s meritocratic articulation of democracy?
An explanation rests with each respective leader’s intention to expand the targeted audience of Chinese state rhetoric. While historically – until the early 2000s – the primary preoccupation of Beijing’s legitimation narrative remained domestic (e.g. the burgeoning class of wealthy entrepreneurs, but also grassroots and middle-class individuals that lacked socioeconomic wherewithal), the scope was considerably expanded as China “turned outwards.” As China acceded to the membership of significant multilateral institutions, as well as played an increasingly significant role in shaping global financial and trade networks, it correspondingly acquired a new target in its search for legitimacy: the international community.
Ideals of pragmatism, representation, and (partially) meritocracy sold well to a domestic audience, both in assuaging criticisms and convincing them that their state was worthy of their support. While during the 1980s, full democratization was (briefly) on the table and vigorously debated in public, the 1990s and 2000s saw a considerably muted response from the Chinese public – as officially sanctioned debates shifted from the politico-ideological to the economic-technocratic. Since then, it has been more than sufficient, for a vast majority of the Chinese public, that their state delivered substantial material benefits, even if they cannot directly participate in the selection and removal of their senior political leaders.
Yet – as Hu exemplified in his attempt to stretch the scope of harmony to an international context in his second term – China’s increasing global influence needed to be accompanied by a narrative that would resonate with audiences beyond its borders. The audience consuming China’s legitimation narrative was not purely domestic – indeed, the party’s basis of legitimacy goes hand-in-hand with its soft power and affective aura overseas.
In an era where American democracy had seemingly lost much of its allure, with its record at handling the pandemic, internal polarization, and significant socioeconomic turmoil, China has caught onto what it views to be the “changing winds” of international relations: the East is on the rise, and the West is on decline, its leaders argue. In their eyes, this has presented senior party cadres the perfect opportunity to promulgate and embody a “different” vision of democracy – one that would, if substantiated and viable, pose a fundamental challenge to the Anglo-American monopoly of the term.
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Brian Wong
Brian Wong is a Rhodes Scholar from Hong Kong (2020) and DPhil in Politics Candidate at Balliol College, Oxford.
9. Steven Metz, To Deter China, Think Big,
Excerpts:
However it unfolds, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be disastrous not only for the people of Taiwan but also for the United States and the global community of democracies. It would signal the end of the system of global order that has constrained great power war since 1945. Whatever came after would be more dangerous. And a major war would be devastating to the global economy, deeply damaging nations with the greatest stake in it. The strategic costs of a major war unleashed by a Chinese invasion of Taiwan make it imperative for the United States and its partners to do as much as possible to deter this.
Deterrence by denial is based on hardening a potential target so that an aggressor concludes that attacking it will not be worth the cost. The West relied on this during the Cold War because the Soviet Union had few other vulnerabilities that could be exploited. China, because of its deeper integration into the global economy and virtual connectivity to the rest of the world, does have potential vulnerabilities. This makes a combination of deterrence by cost imposition and deterrence by denial more effective than either method alone.
Dual deterrence must make Beijing understand that military aggression against Taiwan will both be costly in the short term and produce debilitating, protracted, expansive, and multidimensional costs in the long term. A narrow point defense of Taiwan is important but not enough. A strategy to support Taiwan must also be based on putting China’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities around the world at risk for years or decades. But time is short so this must begin now.
Steven Metz, To Deter China, Think Big, No. 511, December 10, 2021 – Nipp
To Deter China, Think Big
Steven Metz
Steven Metz is Professor of National Security and Strategy at the U.S. Army War College. This essay is solely the work of the author and does not represent the official position of the U.S. Army or U.S. Army War College.
Although it is impossible to know precisely how Chinese leaders expect an invasion of Taiwan to unfold, the dominant narrative in the United States is that the conflict would be short and limited. Some experts believe that if the United States came to Taiwan’s assistance, it could stave off the invasion and China would desist. Other studies and wargames suggest that a massive barrage of Chinese missiles might prevent effective American intervention.
Whether the assessments believe that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would or would not succeed, they have one thing in common: they assume a relatively quick and geographically limited conflict. This leads most supporters of Taiwan to advocate increasing U.S. support to help make that nation a harder target. While this is a good idea it is not enough: deterrence by denial limited to the proximate defense of Taiwan is necessary but not sufficient. An effective strategy to deter China must expand deterrence so that it is global and multidimensional.
A strategy to deter an invasion of Taiwan should focus on China’s greatest strength and vulnerability—its economy. The Chinese Communist Party sustains its grip on power by convincing its citizens that if they tolerate the party’s repression and corruption, they will be rewarded with economic prosperity. Convincing the Chinese leadership that an armed invasion of Taiwan would undercut this prosperity for decades might change their strategic calculus and make the prospect of an invasion, even by a quick, relatively low-cost military campaign, much less appealing. While China’s leaders are committed to absorbing Taiwan, they are realists who understand that the first rule of strategy is that the expected benefits of any policy or action must outweigh the likely costs.
To affect Beijing’s strategic calculus the United States, in partnership with the global community of democratic nations, must think about a long-term strategy to undercut the Chinese economy if China invades Taiwan. The might including shutting off Chinese access to markets, resources, and financial flows around the world for years if necessary. It should incorporate sanctions, cyberwarfare and military force such as naval and air interdiction and blockades. It should clarify that if China invades democratic Taiwan, all the nations of the world will have to choose between continued economic ties with the global community of democratic nations or with a militarily aggressive China.
China should also have to consider whether the repressed non-Chinese people it now controls, like Tibetans and Uyghurs, would see a war between Beijing and the world as an opportunity to seek liberation. Large scale, protracted counterinsurgency is very expensive. The United States and the global community of democratic nations should take every opportunity to remind China of this.
Credibility is a vital component of deterrence. Hence, the United States and the global community of democratic nations should make clear to Beijing that the economic costs of an invasion of Taiwan would be crippling and sustained, hitting China much harder than the United States and its partners. Hints or strategic ambiguity are not enough. This means that integrated, multinational planning for the protracted damaging of the Chinese economy after an armed invasion of Taiwan and for diminishing U.S. economic ties to China makes it less likely that such a plan would need to be implemented.
To make deterrence credible the United States must think about and potentially prepare for protracted, large scale global war. This is the last thing that any American wants, but the paradoxical logic of deterrence suggests that the best way to prevent it is to prepare for it. This means that the U.S. government should study and plan for national mobilization during a protracted global war, to include harnessing the economy for the war effort, severing economic ties to China, and significantly expanding the military.
Today most Americans consider national mobilization for war unthinkable. Even most national security experts scoff at the idea. Unfortunately, the Chinese know this and believe, like the Japanese at the beginning of World War II or Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait in 1990, that Americans do not have the will to reverse armed aggression. The more that the United States can dispel this notion and make the Chinese believe that America would mobilize for war if necessary, the less Beijing will assume that whatever it gains from an invasion of Taiwan would justify the long term costs. Put differently, thinking the unthinkable can have strategic benefits.
However it unfolds, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be disastrous not only for the people of Taiwan but also for the United States and the global community of democracies. It would signal the end of the system of global order that has constrained great power war since 1945. Whatever came after would be more dangerous. And a major war would be devastating to the global economy, deeply damaging nations with the greatest stake in it. The strategic costs of a major war unleashed by a Chinese invasion of Taiwan make it imperative for the United States and its partners to do as much as possible to deter this.
Deterrence by denial is based on hardening a potential target so that an aggressor concludes that attacking it will not be worth the cost. The West relied on this during the Cold War because the Soviet Union had few other vulnerabilities that could be exploited. China, because of its deeper integration into the global economy and virtual connectivity to the rest of the world, does have potential vulnerabilities. This makes a combination of deterrence by cost imposition and deterrence by denial more effective than either method alone.
Dual deterrence must make Beijing understand that military aggression against Taiwan will both be costly in the short term and produce debilitating, protracted, expansive, and multidimensional costs in the long term. A narrow point defense of Taiwan is important but not enough. A strategy to support Taiwan must also be based on putting China’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities around the world at risk for years or decades. But time is short so this must begin now.
The National Institute for Public Policy’s Information Series is a periodic publication focusing on contemporary strategic issues affecting U.S. foreign and defense policy. It is a forum for promoting critical thinking on the evolving international security environment and how the dynamic geostrategic landscape affects U.S. national security. Contributors are recognized experts in the field of national security. National Institute for Public Policy would like to thank the Sarah Scaife Foundation for its generous support that makes the Information Series possible.
The views in this Information Series are those of the author and should not be construed as official U.S. Government policy, the official policy of the National Institute for Public Policy or any of its sponsors. For additional information about this publication or other publications by the National Institute Press, contact: Editor, National Institute Press, 9302 Lee Highway, Suite 750 |Fairfax, VA 22031 | (703) 293- 9181 |www.nipp.org.
© National Institute Press, 2021
10. Defense Intelligence Agency Expected to Lead Military’s Use of ‘Open Source’ Data
The directive should be simple: Use it.
Defense Intelligence Agency Expected to Lead Military’s Use of ‘Open Source’ Data
Directive would place agency in charge of setting policy for intelligence gleaned from social-media and commercial-data troves
WSJ · by Byron Tau in Phoenix and Dustin Volz in Washington
DIA director Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier told a Defense Department technology conference in Phoenix this week that the agency was expecting to get a directive from Pentagon leadership to designate the agency the manager of open-source intelligence—often called OSINT—for all military intelligence programs.
“There’s some controversy with OSINT right now—the tools that we’re using, the tradecraft that we’re practicing, the amount of money that we’re paying for data, who is paying what and what’s being duplicated, how does [publicly available information] fit into all of that,” Gen. Berrier said in remarks before the conference in Phoenix this week. The directive by the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for intelligence is expected “very, very soon,” Gen. Berrier added.
A spokesman for the Pentagon declined to comment on “pre-decisional” matters, including whether there was an expected timeline for the action.
Some people within the intelligence community have proposed creating a new agency specifically dedicated to open-source information. The expected Defense Department action would stop short of that and doesn’t address many thorny privacy and policy questions about how much information governments should be able to obtain on citizens.
At the conference, DIA officials said about 80% of what is in agency intelligence reports now is from unclassified sources. They emphasized that the military was ingesting so much data—much of it from unclassified open sources—that processing and analytical power were now in short supply.
“People used to ask me, what additional information do your analysts need? They’ve got lots of information. They need the ability to process it. They need the ability to understand it,” Gregory Ryckman, the DIA’s deputy director for global integration, told attendees of the Department of Defense Intelligence Information System Worldwide Conference.
Open-source intelligence once referred mostly to monitoring press reports from around the globe. The U.S. government has had offices responsible for monitoring foreign media outlets since the 1940s and expanded into monitoring foreign scientific and technical journals during the Cold War.
Defense Intelligence Agency director Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier said this week that the agency was expecting to be designated as manager of open-source intelligence for military intelligence programs.
Photo: ELIZABETH FRANTZ/REUTERS
In recent years, OSINT has come to encompass an array of unclassified material available online or for purchase. That includes social media and posts on web forums as well as commercially available data collected by technology giants, advertising entities and consumer-facing companies. It also includes a huge category of data that modern electronic devices emit and that are often collected without much consumer awareness, such as precise geolocation, IP addresses, wireless identifiers associated with cars and modern Bluetooth devices.
The government has also invested heavily in developing specialized analytical capabilities to extract information from open sources—for example, tools that can estimate location information from social-media photos using tiny clues such as the position of the sun, stars or visible landmarks like mountains.
Depending on the intelligence priority, these data sets can now be equally or more valuable to government agencies than more traditional, intrusive types of government surveillance like wiretaps, some former U.S. intelligence officials have said. Unlike such sources, open-source retrieval doesn’t require approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
“‘Open-source information is going to be of incalculable value both to our intelligence community and military in the future.’”
— Glenn Gerstell, a former general counsel of the National Security Agency
Open-source intelligence has played a significant role in military operations in recent years, especially in the global campaigns against al Qaeda and Islamic State, according to people familiar with the matter and documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Some of the lethal airstrike targeting in the campaign against Islamic State was done in part through social media—including by identifying and killing terrorist targets who made critical operational security errors like leaving GPS coordinates attached to public social-media posts, the people say.
Foreign governments have come to rely on open-source intelligence, too. The pervasiveness of what some in the field call “digital dust” in modern society has complicated efforts of U.S. spies to remain undercover in overseas postings, according to current and former officials.
The government’s expanding use of open-source data has recently begun to attract significant concern from privacy advocates. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, a small federal agency tasked with reviewing the government’s surveillance practices, has said it is reviewing the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s use of commercially available open-source data sets in relation to its counterterrorism efforts.
The DIA also revealed earlier this year that it had access to data on the movement of millions of American smartphones through data drawn from apps and that it had queried the data five times without warrants in the past few years. All five instances involved matters of national security, the Journal has reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.
“DIA has policies and procedures in place to ensure compliance with all Constitutional, statutory and regulatory requirements and attorney general-approved guidelines for the conduct of intelligence activities,” a DIA spokeswoman said about the agency’s use of OSINT.
The DIA, based in Washington and created 60 years ago, is one of only a handful of intelligence agencies tasked with analyzing information from any information stream, whether gleaned from human spies, cyber data or satellite imagery. In recent years some lawmakers have unsuccessfully proposed overhauling DIA, expressing concerns that it was too large, lacked a core mission focus and was duplicating work of other agencies.
An influential report released early this year by the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Technology and Intelligence Task Force recommended establishing a new agency dedicated to OSINT and called for more investment in OSINT techniques and training.
Glenn Gerstell, a former general counsel of the National Security Agency, said the DIA was a natural choice for the Pentagon to take a formal lead in the area.
“Open-source information is going to be of incalculable value both to our intelligence community and military in the future,” he said.
WSJ · by Byron Tau in Phoenix and Dustin Volz in Washington
11. Inside the Fall of Kabul
A long fascinating read.
Inside the Fall of Kabul
As the U.S. withdrawal approached, analysts thought it would be months before the Taliban brought the fight to Kabul.
Instead, to the shock of the world, the Afghan capital fell in a matter of hours.
This is the story of why it happened and what came after — by a reporter and photographer who witnessed it all.
Default Headline
Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
As the U.S. withdrawal approached, analysts thought it would be months before the Taliban brought the fight to Kabul.
Instead, to the shock of the world, the Afghan capital fell in a matter of hours.
This is the story of why it happened and what came after — by a reporter and photographer who witnessed it all.
Inside the Fall of Kabul
By
Photographs by Jim Huylebroek
Against all predictions, the Taliban took the Afghan capital in a matter of hours. This is the story of why and what came after, by a reporter and photographer who witnessed it all.
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Dec. 10, 2021
Part 1
The Withdrawal
After dark on a mild July evening, I made my way through a heavily fortified neighborhood in downtown Kabul. Over the years, the capital’s elite had retreated deeper behind concrete walls topped with concertina wire; sometimes they even added a layer of Hesco barriers on the sidewalk, forcing me into the street as I passed. I buzzed at the home of a former government official, went inside and climbed the marble stairs to a rooftop party. I’d been to a few of his gatherings over the years, some of them raucous with laughter and dancing, but this was a quiet affair, with a small group of Afghan men and women, mostly young and stylishly dressed, sitting in a circle under the lamplight.
The mood was grim. In recent weeks, large areas of the north, places that had not historically supported the Taliban, had suddenly fallen. A new assessment by the U.S. intelligence community predicted that the republic could collapse as soon as six months after the last American forces left. Yet President Biden was pressing ahead with the withdrawal. That very night, American troops were flying out of Bagram Air Field, the giant base north of the capital where the United States had built a prison to house detainees.
I greeted the guests in Persian, and when I was introduced by the host as a foreign journalist, they fell silent. “Tell us what you think is going to happen to Afghanistan,” a young woman said, turning to me. She added sarcastically, “We’ve probably said the same things already, but we believe them when we hear them from a foreigner.”
A park in Kabul in July.
Like many people in Washington and Kabul, I thought six months was overly pessimistic. The government had a considerable advantage in men, weapons and equipment, and it still held the cities. Surely, I said, Afghanistan’s power brokers, fractious and corrupt as they were, would unite and rally their forces for their own survival.
As civilians, the guests at the party faced a stark question that summer, which they repeated to me: Berim ya bashim? Should we stay or should we go? Afghans had endured the agony of displacement and exile for 40 years; the latest wave began in 2014 at the end of the U.S. troop surge, which was followed by an economic recession and the steady loss of territory to the Taliban. The following year, when Europe’s borders collapsed and a million people crossed the Mediterranean in boats, Afghans were the second-largest group among them, after Syrians.
But the people at this party weren’t likely to cross the mountains or sea with smugglers. Some had studied abroad and returned; others had no intention of leaving, like Zaki Daryabi, publisher of the scrappy independent paper Etilaat-e Roz, which had become known for exposing corruption within the administration of President Ashraf Ghani. Some were waiting for a chance to leave legally, with dignity, for work or school. Yet opportunities for Afghans were rare; they had the worst passports in the world when it came to travel without a visa. Now they were faced with the prospect of becoming refugees.
“I have seven visas in my passport — I can leave,” an older Afghan businessman said. “What about the guy who has no chance, who just has a little house and a little shop?”
“One of them’s me,” Zaki said as he stood up for refreshments. He tapped himself on the chest and grinned ruefully. “One of them’s me.”
Zaki Daryabi at his newspaper’s office.
The Taliban were advancing on the capital, but the prospect of a peace deal frightened many of the guests, as much as the continuation of the war, which had mostly afflicted the countryside. At the insistence of the United States, negotiations between the government and the Taliban were underway in Doha, and a power-sharing agreement that would bring the Taliban to Kabul was seen as a disaster by the urban groups that had benefited from the republic’s relative liberalism and international support, particularly working women.
At the insistence of the guests, a young poet, Ramin Mazhar, stood to read. Slender and stooped, Ramin had a gentle manner that belied his ferocious iconoclasm. Many of his poems, which he posted on Instagram, could be considered blasphemous by fundamentalists. I asked him earlier whether he had published any printed volumes. “No,” he said, smiling. “They’d kill me.”
He recited several of his poems; one, set to music by a singer named Ghawgha Taban, had become an anthem for Kabul’s progressives. After Ramin was finished reading, someone put the song on the stereo, and the guests sang along from the rooftop, their voices growing louder:
You are pious, your kisses are your prayer.
You are different, your kisses are your protest.
You are not afraid of love, of hope, of tomorrow.
I kiss you amid the Taliban, you are not afraid!
A market in the Kote Sangi neighborhood of Kabul in early August.
The day before, I went to see Rangina Hamidi, Afghanistan’s acting minister of education, at her home in Kabul. We were in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic’s third wave, which had filled the hospitals with gasping patients, and the government had closed schools in response; Rangina herself was still recovering from an earlier bout with the virus. She coughed a little as she greeted me on the lawn, where her daughter’s pet goat, Vinegar, stood watching us.
“I’m still having trouble with my memory,” she told me. There were gaps in the lost year. Rangina had returned to work at the ministry, but she felt isolated, part of a political class confined to guarded compounds and armored cars.
In the living room, I embraced her husband, Abdullah, and marveled at how tall their daughter, Zara, who was in fifth grade, had gotten. She was just a baby when I met the family almost a decade ago in Kandahar, the Pashtun heartland that was the birthplace of the Taliban. I used to visit their home during my reporting trips there. I admired Rangina’s ability to bridge two worlds, as a driven entrepreneur who founded a handicraft collective and a woman enmeshed in the social life of Kandahar, one of the most gender-segregated cultures on the planet.
There were few women like Rangina in high office. She was born in Kandahar, but her family, escaping the Communist regime, had gone to the United States as refugees in the 1980s, when Rangina was a child. She majored in women’s studies and religion at the University of Virginia and considered herself a proud feminist; that was also when she chose to start wearing the hijab, which strengthened her connection to her faith.
Her father, Ghulam Haider, an accountant by trade, raised her to pursue the same opportunities in life as a man. He was her hero growing up. When she moved back in 2003 to help in the reconstruction of their country, he was inspired to follow her. At first, they were full of hope. She met Abdullah, an engineer, and founded the handicrafts cooperative; her father became Kandahar’s mayor as the streets filled with American soldiers and the war intensified. In 2011, he was assassinated by a suicide bomber.
Rangina Hamidi with her daughter at home in Kabul.
We sat down for dinner around a tablecloth spread on the carpet, and Rangina heaped my plate with samosas. “Thank you, Madam Minister,” I teased, and we laughed. She told us the story of how she ended up in the cabinet. Four years earlier, she moved to Kabul after a friend recruited her as the first principal of Mezan, a coed private school that offered an international English curriculum. After a couple of years, the school’s success had attracted the capital’s elite. That, she believed, was why she received a call last year from the president. She thought Ghani wanted to know about Mezan’s online learning programs for the pandemic; instead, he asked her to become his minister of education. Shocked, she asked for time to think.
Until then, Rangina had resisted joining the Afghan government; it was dominated by warlords who, she believed, were responsible for killing her father, more so than the Taliban. Those who took part became corrupt themselves, or else were hounded into leaving. But Rangina had long admired Ghani, who as minister of finance in the early years of the republic acquired a reputation as a brilliant technocrat, arrogant but personally incorruptible. When she met him in person at the palace, she was enthralled by his intellect and his vision for reform — a true patriot, she thought. Even his infamous temper reminded her of her father, who didn’t suffer fools.
Praising her work at Mezan, Ghani told her he wanted someone who could help him modernize Afghanistan’s outdated curriculum. Rangina believed that the cultural gap that had grown between the cities and the countryside could be bridged by marrying a traditional version of Islam — one that drew on great Afghan scholars like the poet Rumi — to contemporary teaching practices. When she said yes, she became Afghanistan’s first female education minister since the Communists, who brought radical new opportunities for women to go to school and work in the cities, gains that were wiped out after they were overthrown by American-backed Islamists in 1992. The Taliban, who took power four years later, instituted a ban on girls’ education after puberty. As a result of the American invasion in 2001, an entire generation of Afghan girls had gone to schools and worked at jobs that had been denied to their mothers — an entanglement between the military presence and women’s rights symbolized by a mural outside the U.S. Embassy depicting the girls’ robotics team alongside the American flag.
With American troops finally leaving, that progress was now at risk. In many areas controlled by the Taliban, which they called the Islamic Emirate, girls were only allowed to attend school until sixth grade, which Rangina’s daughter would enter next year.
A cafe in Kabul in early August.
The American withdrawal that had brought the republic to the brink of collapse began in February 2020. That month, the chief negotiator for the United States, Zalmay Khalilzad, dressed in a navy suit, sat at a table in Doha, Qatar, beside his turbaned Taliban counterpart, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, signing copies of a document titled “The Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan.” President Donald Trump, who came into office intent on ending the United States’ longest war, had appointed Khalilzad, an Afghan-born, naturalized U.S. citizen who previously served as ambassador in Kabul.
Afghan government officials were notably absent from the table in Doha — the Taliban had long refused to negotiate with what they considered a puppet regime. But, as a result of the deal, in exchange for U.S. troops being out within 14 months, the Taliban agreed to talks with the republic. Khalilzad and his team had hoped to make the final U.S. withdrawal conditional on peace between the Afghans, but Trump insisted on sticking to the timeline.
Now the vast gulf between republic and emirate had to be bridged. Khalilzad and his team, who believed that Baradar’s side was genuinely interested in reaching a deal, proposed a power-sharing arrangement led by someone “acceptable to both sides” — a definition sure to exclude Ghani. “He hated that, because it means that he has to go,” Khalilzad said of the Afghan president, whom he had known since they were boys. “I didn’t see another way.”
Ghani insisted that he would hand over power only to an elected successor. (He declined to respond to questions.) He proposed a caretaker government and new elections overseen by himself, a nonstarter for the Taliban. But Baradar and his team never offered a concrete counterproposal of their own, insisting instead on a prisoner exchange. Some believed that the Islamists were simply running out the clock until the U.S. forces left.
“The Taliban were not serious about peace,” said Matin Bek, a senior official on the negotiating team. True power within the movement, he thought, resided not with Baradar’s group in Doha but with the military commanders on the ground and the senior leadership hiding in Pakistan. It seemed clear to Bek that the rebels wanted to see if the government could survive on its own before they would accept anything short of outright victory. “If we could put up resistance and stand without the Americans, only then would they enter into real negotiations.”
As the withdrawal progressed and the Taliban gained strength on the battlefield, Ghani grew isolated; allies deserted his government, some with an eye to Khalilzad’s proposed power-sharing arrangement. And so the president came to rely on a shrinking core of trusted aides, who encouraged him to fight the Taliban. Foremost among them was Hamdullah Mohib, the president’s right hand and heir apparent, who, as the national security adviser, controlled much of the information about the war that was presented to the president.
Hamdullah Mohib (center), the Afghan national security adviser, at a military demonstration in Kabul in 2020.
When Ghani selected Mohib to lead the office of the National Security Council in 2018, he had no military or security experience. He had studied computer systems engineering in Britain, where he emigrated as a teenager. In 2009, Mohib helped with Ghani’s first, unsuccessful bid for president, running his website. Five years later, Mohib again volunteered for Ghani, who emerged as the improbable victor from a crowded field, though the disputed result had to be brokered by the United States amid evidence of fraud on all sides. In the West, Ghani was hailed by many as an educated reformer, co-author of the book “Fixing Failed States.”
With Ghani in the palace, Mohib’s rise to power began. The following year, at age 32, he was sent to Washington as Ghani’s ambassador. I got to know him in those days; easygoing and approachable, he seemed successful at the networking the job required, as he lobbied for U.S. support for the war effort. Three years later, Ghani brought him home to coordinate security policy, providing him a house next to his own on the palace grounds; their wives became close, and Mohib’s young children played with the president, who was old enough to be their grandfather.
But Mohib quickly ran into trouble in his new role. As tensions grew between Kabul and Washington over Trump’s plans for withdrawal, Mohib lashed out publicly against Khalilzad, accusing him of seeking personal power as a “viceroy.” Outraged, the Americans froze Mohib out of meetings for a year, and many expected him to lose his job, but the president stuck with him. Eventually, Khalilzad told me, he forgave Mohib at Ghani’s personal request.
Mohib’s team, like much of the Ghani administration, attracted a young cadre that reflected the president’s technocratic values. Favoring tailored suits and speaking excellent English, many were raised or educated abroad, a type that some referred to as “Tommies,” after the brand Tommy Hilfiger. “Young, educated, well-spoken, corrupt,” said Sibghat Ghaznawi, a doctor who had been a Fulbright scholar in the United States with many of them. He said those who succeeded in the palace tended to excel in chappalasi, or brown-nosing, and telling their superiors what they wanted to hear. Last year, when Sibghat became a senior adviser to the office of the National Security Council, he said that Mohib warned him not to be too negative with the president. He already knows these things, Mohib told him, so you don’t need to be reporting what he already knows.
A military demonstration in Kabul in 2020.
In Afghanistan, the causes of state weakness preceded the Ghani administration and went deeper than any particular individuals: a 40-year civil war fueled by foreign superpowers, malignant corruption and the Pakistani military’s covert support for the Taliban. Above all, the U.S. occupation had created a state dependent on American troops and foreign money. As the republic entered a downward spiral, Ghani and his team struggled to consolidate their authority, alienating many who supported the republic. “They were always scared that if a potential deal happens between negotiators, they might be pushed out,” Bek said.
Last year, for instance, Ghani ordered Mohib and the security council to review all district police chiefs and governors; ultimately, they replaced a majority, more than 200 of each, in what was seen as a damaging move in the middle of intensifying violence, one that sidelined local commanders. “The Taliban seized this moment and made peace with those people,” Bek said.
The Islamic Emirate understood a basic lesson from Afghan history, which was that the nation’s wars have often ended with individual commanders switching sides; that was how the Taliban rose to power in the 1990s and how they were defeated in just several weeks in 2001. After they signed a deal with the Americans in Doha, the Taliban promoted a policy of afwa, or amnesty, privately reaching out to power brokers with a clear message: The Americans are leaving, the republic is falling, but the Emirate will forgive those who surrender.
In this battle for hearts and minds, the government’s answer was its psychological-warfare program, overseen by Mohib and the security council. For years, the United States and its allies had funded psy-ops for the Afghan forces, spending heavily on advertising with the local news media. According to Afghan officials, the intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, also made covert payments to Afghan journalists and civil society in exchange for their support. Another initiative was the creation of thousands of fake accounts on Facebook and Twitter dedicated to promoting the government and attacking its critics, work known by the Pashto term Facebookchalawonky.
But these messages did not spread much beyond the bubble world of the Kabul elite, where civil society had largely moved online, as demonstrations and events were targeted by terrorist attacks. Afghanistan’s vibrant cyberspace must have been attractive to officials cloistered within blast walls and armored cars, but it failed to capture the reality of the countryside, where only a fraction of the population had access to the internet.
Sibghat, the adviser to the security council, told me that he was surprised how often social media was cited as evidence during meetings, where many made arguments that he considered demonstrably false: that the Taliban were militarily weak, and it was simply that no one was taking proper action against them. That the insurgents could never act independently from Pakistan. Above all, he said, many working for the council clung to the belief that the United States would never leave Afghanistan. There was simply too much at stake: counterterrorism, regional power, precious minerals. “They’re not so stupid to have spent that money here and then leave,” was how Sibghat characterized the prevailing view.
Bek and other officials also told me that there was a persistent belief within the government that the United States would remain, particularly after Biden defeated Trump. In fairness, there was hope within the U.S. establishment too; in February, a bipartisan group set up by Congress recommended making the withdrawal conditional on peace between Afghan parties — a move that the Taliban said they would react to by resuming attacks on U.S. forces.
Biden and his staff felt that they had been put in an untenable position by his predecessor; there were only 2,500 troops left in Afghanistan, so staying and fighting would have required a new surge. In April, Biden announced that U.S. troops would be out by Sept. 11. “We will not conduct a hasty rush to the exit,” the president said. “We’ll do it responsibly, deliberately and safely.” Mohib, who answered written queries, told me he knew the Americans would leave: “We were planning for their departure.” He said that what they consistently asked for was a “gradual and responsible withdrawal” that would allow Afghan forces to adjust. “We never got that.”
An Afghan soldier looking at Taliban positions during the battle for Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province, last spring.
On July 15, I went to the palace to see Mohib. Above the gate tower, a giant tricolor of the republic fluttered against a clear blue sky. After passing through security, I walked across the long, deserted lawn toward the building that held the Office of the National Security Council. I waited in the council’s empty reception room until one of Mohib’s staff members, a young woman who had studied in America, brought me upstairs to his office, where he sat behind his desk. Our conversation was mostly off the record. He seemed exhausted as we spoke about the desperate fighting in Kandahar City, which had been surrounded by the Taliban.
Only a few days before, there had been a farewell ceremony for Gen. Austin S. Miller, the long-serving U.S. commander. The military had completed 90 percent of its withdrawal, well ahead of Biden’s deadline. This rapid pace was intended to reduce the risk of attack during the retreat, but it had a devastating impact on Afghan security forces. The U.S. military had spent billions to train and equip a force in its own image, heavily dependent on foreign contractors and air support. But the Afghan Army’s notoriously corrupt generals stole their men’s ammunition, food and wages; while security forces were supposed to total 300,000, the real number was likely less than a third of that. Out in the districts, the army and the police were crumbling, handing over their arms to the Taliban, who now controlled a quarter of the country.
Ghani had repeatedly insisted that he would stand and fight. “This is my home and my grave,” he thundered in a speech earlier in the spring. His vice president, Amrullah Saleh, and the security council were working on a post-American strategy called Kaf, a Dari word meaning “base” or “floor,” which envisioned garrison cities connected by corridors held by the army and bolstered by militias, similar to how President Mohammad Najibullah clung to power for three years after the Soviet withdrawal. “It was very much the Russian model,” said Bek, who returned to the government as the president’s chief of staff that month. “They had a good plan on paper, but for this to work, you needed to be a military genius.”
Earlier in July, Ghani was warned that only two out of seven army corps were still functional, according to a senior Afghan official. Desperate for forces to protect Kandahar City, the president pleaded with the C.I.A. to use the paramilitary army formerly known as counterterrorism pursuit teams, according to Afghan officials. Trained for night raids and clandestine missions in the borderlands, the units had grown into capable light infantry, thousands strong. They were now officially part of the Afghan intelligence service and were known as Zero Units, after codes that corresponded to provinces: 01 was Kabul, 03 was Kandahar and so forth. But according to the officials, the C.I.A. still paid the salaries of these strike forces and had to consent to Ghani’s request for them to defend Kandahar City that month. (A U.S. official stated that the units were under Afghan control; the C.I.A. declined to comment on details of their deployment.) “They’re very effective units, motivated, cheap,” Mohib told me in his office, saying Kandahar would have fallen without them. “They don’t need all sorts of heavy equipment. I wish we had more like them.”
But the Zero Units had a reputation for ruthlessness in battle; both journalists and Human Rights Watch have referred to them as “death squads” — allegations that the C.I.A. denied, saying they were the result of Taliban propaganda. I had been trying to track these shadowy units for years and was surprised to see them, in their distinctive tiger stripes, given glowing coverage on the government’s social media accounts.
In Kabul, I met with Mohammad, an officer from one of the N.D.S. units that operated around the capital, whom I had known for a few years. Mohammad had worked as an interpreter for the unit’s American advisers and as an instructor for undercover teams that carried out arrests inside the cities. He said morale had plummeted among his men, now that the Americans were leaving. According to Afghan officials, the station on Ariana Square was empty by late July. But Mohammad’s team still received advice from the Americans. He showed me messages that he said were from the C.I.A., urging his unit to patrol areas around Kabul that had been infiltrated by the insurgents. “The airport is still in danger,” one message said.
The front line between Afghan government forces and the Taliban on the edge of Kandahar City in early August.
The bubble world did not survive on psychological repression alone. At the end of June, I had visited an Afghan journalist named Shershah Nawabi at the office of his small news agency, Pasbanan. A group of young men and women sat at computers in the sparsely furnished office, guzzling energy drinks.
“Here, take this, I can’t publish it,” Nawabi said, handing me the draft of an article titled, in Persian, “Latest Report: 98% of Government Officials’ Families Live Outside Afghanistan.”
The story listed the countries where the families of the Ghani administration were living, from the president — whose children grew up in the United States — on down. Out of 27 cabinet ministers, it claimed, only two had families who resided in Afghanistan full time. “In the event of a crisis in the country,” Shershah had written, “all government officials will consider fleeing.”
He had been leaked the information by sources inside the government. “I made a mistake,” he said. “I called them to try to verify the info.” The N.D.S. got wind, and one of his contacts at the intelligence service warned him not to endanger himself and his staff by publishing it.
On July 11, Hedayatullah Pakteen, a young university professor who had been part of Muzhdah’s circle, was arrested at his home by intelligence agents and held for seven nights. He said he was hung by his wrists and beaten repeatedly, in an attempt to get him to implicate several others who were accused of links with the Taliban. He was freed after a campaign from his friends in the media; he said he was forced to sign a document promising that he wouldn’t give interviews anymore. His friend Abdul Ghafar Kamyab, a defense lawyer known for taking the cases of people accused of being Taliban, was snatched from the center of Kabul and was missing for more than 40 days; he told me he was tortured severely, including with electric shocks.
According to Sibghat, the adviser to the office of the National Security Council, during the previous year he had participated in discussions about a group of lawyers and professors, former friends of Muzhdah, who called themselves peace activists. Sibghat told me that some officials had argued that they were Taliban sympathizers who should be arrested and “squeezed,” which Sibghat understood as a euphemism for torture, until they agreed to stop speaking to the news media. Sibghat said he argued against it, pointing out that the Communists had used such methods and failed; Mohib, as was his habit, remained aloof without saying anything definite.
Torture had long been common in the republic’s prisons, as documented since 2011 by the United Nations. The U.N.’s biannual reports cataloged a list of methods that included waterboarding and sexual assault, much of it carried out by the N.D.S., which was advised by the C.I.A. and British intelligence (both agencies have denied any involvement with torture). That July, according to Afghan officials, the British had gone to the government to protest the existence of an N.D.S. “hit list”; the Afghans fired two senior intelligence officials as a result. (The British government declined to comment.)
But as much as Kabul’s journalists feared violence at the hands of the government, some worried that if the republic fell, worse would follow. At the end of July, I visited Zaki, the publisher I met at the rooftop party, to see how he was faring. We sat upstairs in the office of Etilaat-e Roz, cups of green tea and a packet of thin Esse cigarettes between us. “So what do you think is going to happen?” he asked with a smile.
Zaki was slight, with delicate features; he and most of his staff were Hazara, a historically oppressed Shia minority. He hadn’t studied or lived abroad; he came from his village to Kabul for college and had founded his newspaper with a loan from friends. Over the last 10 years, Etilaat-e Roz had slowly grown, scraping by with ad sales and subscriptions, resisting emoluments from powerful sponsors. It finally attracted foreign grants from places like the Open Society Foundations and had become known for its bold exposés of corruption in the government.
But with the system disintegrating, Zaki said that he had been thinking about the role of the gadfly differently. Criticism, like objectivity, made sense only within a shared set of values. “If we’re talking political philosophy, and the question of a republic versus an emirate, well, that’s different,” he told me. “We’re liberals. We believe in freedom and democracy.”
Afghan Army soldiers being evacuated from a base in Helmand Province last spring.
The entire order had been dependent on foreign money, which created space for progressives like Zaki. But opposition to liberalism, or what was labeled “Westernization,” was not confined to the Taliban. A broad streak of political Islamism cut across Afghan society; even among Hazaras, there were reactionary clerics who would have been happy to lash Zaki and the other men and women who hung out in the cafes near the office. Even under a power-sharing agreement, Zaki feared that freedom of the press and women’s rights would be the first areas of compromise. But Etilaat-e Roz was his young life’s work, his fourth child. Of course it was his other three children who made the choice to stay so difficult.
“Some of us have no choice but to keep doing this, because of what we believe,” Zaki told me, with his rueful smile. He was going to remain as long as it was possible to do his work, as long as some foothold remained in the capital, however narrow, above the abyss that was opening. “We’re working as if Kabul won’t fall,” he said. “If Kabul falls, Etilaat-e Roz will fall, too.”
Lining up for water at an informal camp for internally displaced people in Kandahar in early August.
The republic’s accelerating collapse, which had begun in the rural areas, soon reached the towns and district centers, and finally the cities. On Aug. 6, Zaranj, the capital of Nimruz, became the first provincial center to fall to the Taliban. Nader Nadery, a member of the republic’s negotiating team from Nimruz, was called for a meeting with the president; he told Ghani that several of his relatives had been killed there. “I said that things are falling apart, the chain of command is broken and people are not telling the truth to you,” Nadery told me. “He answered, ‘Yes, it will take another six months for us to turn it around.’” Stunned, Nadery left the palace wondering what kind of information the president was getting.
The day after Nimruz, a second capital, Sheberghan, fell. The next day, three capitals fell in the north: Sar-i-Pul, Takhar and Kunduz.
That evening, I went to see Rangina. Zara’s goat, Vinegar, which cried incessantly when left alone, had been taken into the guard shed for the night. I sat with Rangina and Abdullah, discussing the rumors of martial law circulating in the capital. Behind Rangina, I could see the reflection of the television in the window as the evening news played images of burning buildings, refugees, soldiers promising to die for their country. There were increasingly strident assertions about what a Taliban takeover would mean: stories about the forced marriage of young girls and widows to their fighters, even sex slavery. It would mean a return to the brutal days when men without beards were flogged in the streets, when women were not allowed to leave the home without a guardian, of public executions in soccer stadiums, of stoning and amputations, a massacre for everyone who had worked for the foreigners, a genocide for Afghanistan’s Hazara minority.
In the past, these kinds of statements had always been followed by a “therefore”: Therefore, America must not leave Afghanistan. Therefore, the war should continue. Now they were bleak predictions.
Rangina Hamidi at home in Kabul, after the city fell.
Rangina was frightened; the defense minister’s home was blown up just a few days earlier. But she was also skeptical about some of the claims of Taliban savagery; she told me about how the staff at a local education ministry in a recently captured province had posed for a photo with their new Taliban boss, seemingly unharmed.
I had been planning to travel to the south for research, and I thought I might stay at the office of Rangina’s cooperative, Kandahar Treasure. “Are you sure you want to go now?” she asked.
I didn’t understand how quickly things were falling apart; maybe I was in denial, too. I went to Hamid Karzai International Airport three days later, on the morning of Aug. 11. It was busier than I had ever seen it, a crush of passengers headed for the international terminal. The domestic side was quiet and tense. There were flights to the main cities of Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif, where, like Kandahar, battles were raging as the Taliban laid siege.
I went through security and sat in the boarding lounge, but I couldn’t get in touch with the fixer who was supposed to pick me up in Kandahar. I couldn’t get in touch with anyone there, in fact. Finally, a journalist friend called using the internet at the military base at the airport there. The Taliban had shut down the mobile networks in preparation for an all-out assault.
I got up and walked back out through security. The airline staff chased me down.
“I’m leaving,” I said. “My trip has been canceled.”
“Why?” They stared at me suspiciously.
“Because the phone networks are down. My office won’t let me go.”
I waited as they took a picture of my boarding pass and passport.
“He’s the third person to cancel like this,” one woman whispered anxiously.
When I got my documents back, I walked out against the flow of Afghans leaving their country. In the parking lot, there were groups of families, some crying and some silent, people in their Western outfits for travel, suits and T-shirts, girls with big up-dos and painted faces, matrons taking photos, men in turbans and karakul hats and prayer caps, the families embracing and then dividing, one part walking away, the others left watching.
The Afghan defense minister’s residence in Kabul was attacked with a car bomb and then stormed by Taliban fighters in early August.
Part 2
The Fall
For months, American leaders had been reassuring the Afghans that the military withdrawal did not the mean the end of U.S. engagement. Even after the last troops left on Aug. 31, a 650-strong security force was supposed to remain behind to protect the massive embassy complex. And with the U.S. Embassy remaining, other Western organizations were more likely to stay, too, and supplies and financial aid would continue to flow to the republic.
But now the rebels were advancing as fast as their motorcycles could carry them. On Thursday, Aug. 12, the city of Herat fell, and the Taliban captured Ghazni, 70 miles southwest of the capital. The Taliban had promised not to harm embassies and international groups, but the specter of the terrorist attack in Benghazi that killed U.S. diplomats in 2012 hung over the Biden administration. If even a single American was harmed, how could the Democrats defend having trusted the Taliban?
On Thursday, Biden ordered the embassy to shut down, and diplomats began destroying classified materials and shifting operations to the airport, where 3,000 U.S. soldiers and Marines were being flown in to evacuate American citizens and their allies.
The Taliban would soon be at the gates. Could Kabul be defended? In theory, the capital boasted an impressive force: tens of thousands of soldiers and police officers, among them the country’s most elite units. But even if Kabul could be held, Ghani seemed to have finally accepted that the war was lost and had opened secret talks with the Taliban. According to Afghan officials and U.S. diplomats, his envoy in Doha, Abdul Salam Rahimi, had been developing a back channel to the movement’s leadership — not only to Baradar, the chief negotiator, but to the two powerful military deputies, Sirajuddin Haqqani and Mawlawi Yaqoub, son of the deceased leader Mullah Omar. The Taliban said they did not want to fight a bloody battle for Kabul, one that could mean the destruction of its banks and embassies and nongovernmental organizations, of its institutions, of the entire system.
On Thursday, the same day that Biden ordered the embassy to close, Rahimi, who had recently come back from Qatar, met with Ghani and Mohib and explained the proposal he had worked out with the Taliban, according to the officials. It was, in essence, a negotiated surrender; the Taliban would agree to a two-week cease-fire so that a delegation from Kabul could travel to Doha and work out the details of a transitional government. The Taliban would be in charge, but their rule would be “inclusive,” which meant some republic officials might take part. Ghani would call a loya jirga, a gathering of notables, who would approve the deal. Then Ghani would resign and hand over power to the jirga, who would ask the Taliban to form a government.
Immediately after the meeting, Khalilzad’s team in Doha, which had been in the loop about the back channel, received two calls. The first was from Rahimi, explaining that Ghani had agreed to the deal and was prepared to step down. (Rahimi did not respond to a request for comment.) The second was from Mohib. According to a U.S. diplomat involved in the negotiations, Mohib described the meeting in more conditional terms: Ghani would agree, but only if he was certain that his terms were being met. (Mohib denied this, claiming that he made “no reference” to Rahimi’s discussions.)
That night, seeking clarity on Ghani’s intentions, Antony Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, spoke with him by video conference. According to the U.S. diplomat, Ghani said he would agree to the deal, to Blinken’s relief. He was prepared to resign.
“It was closer to Rahimi’s version than Mohib’s,” the diplomat said. Now the Afghans needed to carry out the peaceful transfer of power; they had, in theory, two weeks until the Americans left the airport, during which time the Taliban were supposed to remain outside the city.
The fate of the capital’s millions of inhabitants hung in the balance.
Afghan soldiers firing at the Taliban on the front line in Kandahar in early August.
On Friday, Aug. 13, Kabul’s residents awoke to news of the American evacuation. It was the Islamic day of rest. Though the Taliban were advancing, they still hadn’t reached the nearest cities, and Kabul’s streets were quiet as I drove to visit Rangina. She had invited me for lunch, and I found her in the hall by the kitchen, her sleeves rolled up, scraping out pumpkins alongside the cook. She cleaned up and joined her husband and me; she said she had just turned down a request from the National Security Council to turn the schools into shelters for refugees. “They just reopened the schools, and now you want me to close them?” she said. “If you want to do that, then declare martial law and do it.”
People from neighboring districts were pouring into the capital, fleeing ahead of the Taliban, who the U.S. Embassy had warned were committing war crimes. Given Afghanistan’s bloody history, they had reason to be fearful. In 1992, after the Communist government collapsed, the mujahedeen tore the capital apart fighting one another. Four years later, the Taliban hung the former president, Najibullah, and brandished whips against those who played music or shaved their beards. And in 2001, the United States and its warlord allies had hunted down the vanquished Taliban around the country; some were shipped off to detention centers and tortured. Now many were certain that despite their promise of amnesty, the Taliban would take revenge.
Rangina was getting calls from friends and relatives in the United States, telling her to flee before it was too late. “How many of us are you going to save?” she asked. “Thirty-five million? And then live with shame for the rest of my life? Because I had the American passport in my pocket, and I could just leave.”
Her phone rang, and she answered on speaker. It was an employee from her cooperative in Kandahar City, who said that one of his relatives, a former police officer, had been pulled from his home by Taliban fighters and shot.
“Allah!” Rangina exclaimed.
“Be careful, be careful,” Abdullah told him.
“We don’t know what the hell is going to happen,” Rangina said, after they hung up. We looked out the window, to where Zara was playing on the lawn with four other girls. Only one had an American passport. Rangina’s mother, who is in the United States, had begged her to send Zara there, if she and Abdullah were too stubborn to leave. Rangina was considering it.
“This guy doesn’t agree with me,” she said, turning to her husband. “Unless he’s changed his mind, I don’t know. Have you? You want her here? And if these wild animals come and, God forbid. … ”
We looked at Abdullah, who was silent for a moment, as if some memory was stirring in him. He was older than Rangina. He had fought the Russians, lived through three regime changes, seen bodies in the streets and homes gutted by looting. And he knew how vicious the Taliban had been with their opponents in the 1990s. He was ready to give his life to protect his wife and daughter; he also knew that might not be enough. But he didn’t want Rangina and Zara to be separated. “Then you leave, too,” he said.
“I’m not leaving,” Rangina replied.
A line outside the passport office in Kabul in early July.
That night, I went to a farewell party in the Green Zone, on the same blocked-off street as the Canadian and British Embassies. Many of the foreign nationals based in Kabul left the country during the pandemic to work remotely, but the few who remained had been as surprised as everyone by the sudden collapse of the government. As we gathered on the front lawn of an NGO guesthouse, gorging on hoarded wines and whiskey, some were in tears, while others danced manically.
The decision of the U.S. Embassy to pull out meant that most other Western organizations were evacuating, too, although the embassies of Iran, Russia and China — America’s rivals — were going to remain. As a rumor spread at the party that the U.S. military would shut down commercial flights at the airport in a few days, people got on their phones and tried to rebook; most tickets were sold out.
Afterward, a friend persuaded me to go with him to another party at a senior Afghan official’s house, someone close to Ghani. I’d been there a couple times. It was a blast-walled compound with AstroTurf in the yard, mirrors on the walls, exotic pets and a bountiful liquor cabinet. Once we got past the guards, we found just a few people sitting around, glued to their phones. I sat next to the official, who liked to D.J. at parties.
“Three thousand troops are coming, you think that will change anything?” he said. He showed me a message on his phone. “This is info from the TB side. They’ll take 17 provinces, in a power-sharing deal with the government.”
That was roughly half of the country. “I don’t think they’d settle for less than total control now,” I said.
He shook his head angrily. “No, they’ll realize if they take it all, the Americans might come with a hundred thousand troops,” he said. He tapped his head. “They’re rational. They have advisers from Pakistan, from China, from Russia. You think these guys with the long beards are making decisions?”
Ghani had banned senior officials from leaving the country, but the day after the party, my host made it out through the airport, accompanied by a relative of the president.
On Saturday, Aug. 14, the start of the workweek, the streets of downtown Kabul were in a frenzy, crowded with people running desperate errands. Some were trying to obtain passports or plane tickets, while others stood in long lines outside the banks. There was a shortage of cash. The value of the afghani had dropped suddenly; people wanted dollars.
Early that morning, I went for a jog in the park by my house and found it crowded with displaced families in tents, the air thick with cooking smoke and the stench of the outdoor toilets. Taxis and vans loaded with mattresses and a few household goods rolled up, and people piled out, seeking what free space was available.
I was busy that day with my own errands, like finding a satellite phone, even though for months I’d been making contingency plans with my housemate, Jim Huylebroek, a Belgian photographer. We’d talked through various scenarios for the fall of the capital, at first with the idle enthusiasm of preppers, and then with growing earnestness. Would there be a breakdown in communications? Martial law, house-to-house fighting, abductions? Riots and looting?
The New York Times, like most Western media organizations, was preparing to evacuate its staff. But Jim and I were both freelancers, so we could choose to stay. I had been watching what happened when the Taliban captured the cities of Herat and Kandahar. There was some violence, but there were no massacres, no executions of captured officials; the movement seemed to have control over its fighters. Now that they would govern, it was in the Emirate’s own interest, I thought, to stick to its promises, especially when it came to foreigners.
What I feared most was a chaotic interregnum before the Taliban could establish control, in a city filled with armed men. We might have to hole up in our house, which had solar power and was well fortified with bars on the windows; Jim and I stockpiled everything from canned goods to buckshot.
A boy named Hanif being treated in a hospital in early August after he was hit by a stray bullet during fighting near his house in Kandahar.
That afternoon, Ghani called a meeting at the palace, a gathering of the country’s most powerful men. The former president, Hamid Karzai, sat in a semicircle with leaders of the mujahedeen, former Communists, contracting barons — men who were handed power by the Americans in 2001, when their enemies, the Taliban, seemed utterly defeated. They had presided over two decades of plenty, when a rain of billions from abroad had enriched a minority, even as poverty among the people had grown. Now they faced the ruin of the republic.
Mohib was there, but the bellicose vice president, Saleh, wasn’t — the daily Kabul security meeting he normally led had been canceled that morning because of his absence, one participant said, though no one made much of it at the time. Ghani asked the others what they had to say. Karzai spoke of his fears for families like his own, who, he pointedly noted, were still in Kabul. The time had come for painful sacrifices, Karzai said, but he did not explicitly call on Ghani to resign. His point seemed clear enough, and it was echoed by the others, who pleaded with the president to avoid bloodshed and destruction in the capital.
If Ghani had in fact agreed to a deal with the Taliban through Rahimi’s back channel, then the meeting was mostly political theater. But Ghani didn’t explain the details, whether out of caution or pride, or because he still hadn’t decided if he would go through with it. He simply told the others that a delegation should go to Qatar immediately; he would accept whatever agreement they made with the Taliban.
The president left the meeting, and afterward, a group stood outside in consternation. Some, unaware of the secret talks, wondered if the president understood he had to resign. There was confusion over who would go to Doha. Mohammad Akram Khpalwak, an adviser to the president, was sent to ask Ghani, who answered that he would decide after he talked with the Americans.
That evening, Ghani met with the commander of U.S. forces and the acting ambassador to discuss the security plan for Kabul. The Americans promised to provide air support and surveillance. Then Ghani spoke by videoconference with Blinken. Again, according to the U.S. diplomat, they discussed the back channel for an orderly transfer of power to the Taliban.
By that night, Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan had fallen, and the Taliban continued their rapid advance on the capital. The republic’s forces, utterly demoralized, were simply laying down their arms, allowing the rebels, after their long, lean years in the mountains, to take possession of billions of dollars worth of vehicles and weapons bought by the United States and its allies. The competition between commanders for booty and the prestige of being the first to conquer territory added momentum to the Taliban’s advance — as did rivalries within the movement. The Taliban leadership was largely from the south, especially Kandahar, but most of the insurgency around Kabul had fallen under the command of the Haqqanis, a family-led network of fighters from eastern Afghanistan that was close to the Pakistani military. Several months earlier, a senior figure, Khalil Haqqani, began making contact with Afghan officials, his former aide told me, paving the way for a push on Kabul from the east. The Taliban’s own psychological warfare was paying off: By now, cities were falling without a fight, surrendering after a mere phone call.
A deserted checkpoint in Kabul the night after the city fell.
In the early hours of Sunday morning, the provincial governor of Nangarhar, the gateway to Kabul to the east, received his counterpart from the Emirate. Taliban fighters entered the city without firing a shot. As the sun rose, Haqqani sent a voice message congratulating the governor for handing over power peacefully: “You will have a place in history, for protecting the people’s lives and property.”
Taliban forces from Kandahar, meanwhile, hurriedly advanced north, toward Wardak Province, whose capital, only 10 miles from Kabul, fell around 10 o’clock on Sunday morning.
The road was now open to Kabul, where the police and the army were starting to desert their posts. Saleh, the vice president who had run security meetings for the capital, had secretly escaped to his home province of Panjshir, which helped throw the chain of command in Kabul into disarray. Local criminal gangs — many of them connected to the police — were waiting for their chance to start looting. At 9 that morning, when the police abandoned the station in District 7, near the king’s old palace, local gangsters, some dressed as Taliban in turbans, began to loot the station of weapons and other valuables, according to residents; they were joined by passers-by, who carried off computers and furniture.
By noon on Sunday, Aug. 15, Taliban fighters had reached the gates of the capital. The rebels gathered at the eastern and southern outskirts of the city on motorcycles and captured pickups, dusty and tired from the road, and waited.
Shortly before 10 o’clock that morning, the president sat in the shade of a courtyard at the palace, reading a book. He had met with Rahimi, who updated him on the back channel talks with the Taliban; that same morning, Khalilzad was meeting with Baradar in Doha to discuss the proposal for a peaceful transfer of power. Then Ghani met alone with Mohib, followed by a larger group including Bek, who said he suggested that the president call an emergency cabinet meeting in order to rally his officials. It was then that many learned that Saleh had escaped; the meeting never happened.
At 10 a.m., Khpalwak, the adviser, arrived in the courtyard, in order to find out who was supposed to travel to Doha to negotiate the handover. Karzai was sitting in his house next door, ready to leave that evening or the next morning on an Afghan charter flight. Khpalwak told me that Ghani said that Mohib should go to Doha, as well.
Jawed Kootwal, Khpalwak’s chief of staff, had snapped a photo of the president from his office window — Ghani’s frequent reading breaks had become a joke between him and his friends. Now Kootwal watched as his boss left and Mohib arrived with a man wearing a white robe and an Arab headdress. Kootwal took another photo, which he would later publish online. The man, a United Arab Emirates official, was named Saif, an acquaintance of Mohib’s who was well connected with Afghan power brokers. The meeting had not been listed on the president’s schedule that day.
Traffic on the ramp to the main road in front of the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul on Aug. 15, the day the city fell.
It was nearly 11 a.m. when I stepped out of my house, and the traffic jam in the city had grown even worse. The cars in the street were at a standstill. Jim and I had no idea what would happen next. We were too busy to dwell on it; the sight of an entire world dissolving produced a certain numbness. There was the relentless sound of helicopters, while around us life continued as it had to — the shops and markets were open.
I had planned to meet two former translators from the U.S. military, who were desperately hoping to be evacuated with the departing forces. They got stuck in traffic and finally ended up walking the last mile; when they arrived, we decided to sit in the yard of a nearby restaurant, and have an early lunch.
Over a pan of chicken karahi, the translators, Mahdi and Nadim, told me about the time they’d spent with the U.S. Special Forces. Each had extensive combat experience, and several Green Berets had written them recommendation letters, but they’d still been waiting for years to go to America under the Special Immigrant Visa program for local employees. There was a backlog of some 20,000 applications. According to a U.S. official, Ghani had resisted a mass airlift, arguing that it would spark panic, and charter flights didn’t start until the end of July. In recent months, as the Taliban advanced on Kabul, their wait had turned to agony. Mahdi had reached the final stage and submitted his passport; in July, he was called to the embassy, where it was handed back to him, stamped “Canceled without prejudice” — most likely a paperwork snafu, he was told, but it would eventually be resolved.
“We don’t have any more time,” Nadim said, his voice rising. The two translators were certain the Taliban would behead them if they caught them. “If you don’t hear from us, it means we’re dead — so tell our story.”
It was almost noon; my phone had been on silent the whole time. I looked up and saw my driver walking toward us, a look of shock on his face.
“People are saying the Taliban have entered Kabul,” he told us. “They’re inside the city.”
Taliban fighters on the outskirts of Kabul on Aug. 15
Around 11 a.m., officials at the palace heard gunfire. Panic seized the N.S.C. building as rumors spread that the Taliban were attacking the palace. From his window, Najib Motahari, Bek’s chief of staff, could see some of Mohib’s staff running across the lawn, fleeing toward the gate — Tommies, he thought contemptuously.
On social media, there was talk that the Taliban had arrived at the outskirts of the city. Were the Taliban breaking the agreement for a cease-fire? At the N.S.C. building, Bek met with Rahimi, the president’s envoy, and began making phone calls, trying to find out what was happening. They spoke with Baradar’s team in Qatar, who insisted that their forces had not entered the city.
The Taliban were as surprised as everyone else by their lightning success; they weren’t prepared to take control of the capital and feared a confrontation with the Americans at the airport. To confirm the cease-fire agreement they had made with Rahimi, the Taliban spokesman now posted a statement online: “Because Kabul is a big city with a large population, the mujahedeen of the Islamic Emirate do not intend to enter by force, and negotiations are underway with the other side for a peaceful transfer of power.”
To the American team in Doha, the statement was validation that the back channel was in contact with the Taliban’s military leadership, who could deliver a cease-fire on the ground. “To have them release a long statement like that about their fighters does not occur without Yaqoub and Siraj’s blessing,” the U.S. diplomat told me. According to several Taliban commanders I later spoke to, they had received orders not to enter the capital. And local residents said that the Taliban massed at the city’s gates were in fact holding back at that point.
Bek, reassured, posted a message on Twitter at noon: “Don’t panic! Kabul is safe!”
But while Khalilzad’s team might have been optimistic about the cease-fire holding, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul had decided to get the last of its staff out immediately and haul down the flag. Twenty minutes after Bek’s post, the embassy sent out an alert that prompted many of Kabul’s foreigners to make a sudden dash to the airport. A security adviser at the embassy posted a WhatsApp message to a group of expats, giving a deadline of 5:30 that evening for helicopter evacuations from the Green Zone: “Urgent Update — the US Embassy advises that all foreign missions move to HKIA immediately.”
Outside the U.S. Embassy on Aug. 15. A mural encouraging girls and boys to dream of the future was later painted over by the Taliban.
Hearing the driver’s news, I quickly paid for our meal and said farewell to the two interpreters. I told my driver to go home to his family and set out on foot. People were wild with fear, having heard that the Taliban were in the city. Some shouted into phones; others dashed heedlessly through traffic. The sound of helicopters and jets was loud in the sky. A motorcade of Land Cruisers, sirens blaring, forced its way through the intersection.
It was noon when I got home, and I found my housemate, Jim, with his camera in hand, already wearing a traditional robe. I donned mine; we both spoke Dari and could usually pass for locals. He wanted to take a walk and see what was happening in our neighborhood; it wasn’t clear to us, from the rumors and official denials on Twitter, whether the Taliban had actually entered Kabul.
The last shopkeepers were locking their gates as we walked down Chicken Street. Workers were rushing out of their offices and heading home. Now and again, we could hear scattered gunshots. There was a police headquarters and ministry nearby; some guards were still in uniform, but others stood wearing robes, ready to run. Some checkpoints were deserted.
A police commander lived on our street, and when we got back, we found his guards milling outside his house, most of them in plainclothes already. I had a sudden sense of the fragility of the social contract that bound us; our shared reality was melting into air. I was as worried about being robbed or shot by them as I was about the Taliban.
“Our leaders sold us out,” one of the police officers said. “If the Taliban come here, what can we do?”
We looked up. An American gunship was circling over the city, firing off shimmering flares.
Afghan police officers changed into civilian clothes on Aug. 15 near the home of the author and the photographer.
After the panic that morning at the palace, Bek went to see Ghani and explained that the Taliban in Doha had announced that they would not enter the city. The president agreed to record a message to reassure the population of Kabul. It was filmed around 1:30, with Ghani sitting at a desk in his office that once belonged to King Amanullah, who fled the country a century earlier in the face of an Islamist uprising. Afterward, Bek and Rahimi went for lunch together. The presidential guards had locked down the palace and sent most of the staff away; the place was quiet. To Bek, the situation seemed under control.
But Mohib was getting ready to escape. He had never trusted the Taliban and believed that they had already started to enter the city. Mohib later wrote to me that Khalil Haqqani called him and asked him to surrender. “I explored their desire for negotiations, but it was clear they were set on a military victory,” he wrote. “They had not negotiated in good faith thus far, and they certainly were not in a position to have to do that on August 15.” Haqqani’s former aide disputed this, saying that Mohib asked to set up a meeting between their representatives and that Haqqani agreed and promised he wouldn’t be harmed.
Motahari, Bek’s aide, told me he saw Mohib’s senior staff running around the N.S.C. offices carrying bags and overhead them talking about the council’s operational cash. (Mohib and his staff denied taking bags of money out of the country.)
The president’s personal helicopters, on standby at the airport, were summoned to the palace. Three Mi-17s landed. Unusually, they were fully fueled, which meant they couldn’t carry as many passengers. According to several people present, a group that included Mohib and Rula Ghani boarded first; then Mohib went back with the head of the palace guard and returned with the president. Several of the president’s supporters later told me that Ghani had been reluctant to leave and had to be persuaded that his life was in danger.
As the president boarded, there was a fight between the remaining guards and staff over who would fit on board the last helicopter; Mohib’s secretary was thrown to the tarmac.
The helicopters took off and headed north. They were not returning to the airport, where, according to one official present, the U.A.E. was going to send a plane to evacuate them. Instead — whether it was because they feared the growing chaos at the airport or didn’t want to face the Americans — the president and his crew flew low through the mountains, trying to avoid detection by the U.S. military, which still controlled Afghanistan’s airspace.
By then it was around a quarter to 3. Bek was walking through the palace; he told me he didn’t realize the president had flown away in a helicopter. The sky was full of them that day. It wasn’t until he ran into an agitated Hanif Atmar, the foreign minister, who been holding onto the president’s passport, that Bek learned what had happened, he said.
“Do you know where the president is?” asked Atmar, who had arrived just as the choppers were taking off.
“The president went home,” Bek answered.
“No. He ran away.”
“I don’t believe it. I just saw him.”
“Look,” Atmar said, pulling out the passport with the seal of the republic on the cover. “He’s gone.”
Vehicles belonging to Afghan politicians racing through the streets in front of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul on Aug. 15.
When Jim and I got back from our walk, shortly before 2 p.m., I saw I had a message from Rangina: “Hi. Are you OK? What’s going on?”
I called her and we spoke briefly; she was at home, having left the education ministry around noon, accompanied by her staff. She didn’t know any more than I did about what was going on at the palace with Ghani. “I have no way of connecting with him, so I have no idea where he is,” Rangina said over the phone, sounding surprisingly calm. The Taliban’s announcement that they wouldn’t enter the capital by force had eased her mind; she had also heard a rumor that the Americans would take over security.
We said farewell. Jim and I decided to get on our bicycles and go for a ride around the city. As we came outside, we saw the police on our street fleeing in civilian vehicles, as the neighbors gaped.
The streets were almost empty of cars now, the shops shuttered. As we arrived at the traffic circle outside the U.S. Embassy, two Chinooks took off and roared overhead. We stopped and stared at the departing helicopters. “Remember, this is not Saigon,” the secretary of state would say on television later that day.
Jim got off his bike and started snapping photos. It was hot and my mouth was dry, so I bought some water from a juice cart. We could see plumes of smoke rising from inside the Green Zone. A convoy of armored S.U.V.s screeched through the roundabout, headed for the airport. Groups of ragged-looking men walked past, some carrying small bundles tied in scarves. “They’re prisoners,” the juice seller told us. “A big group of them came by earlier.” Earlier that day, the guards at the main prison in the city had fled, and the prisoners had broken loose — the same thing happened at the detention center in Bagram, north of the capital.
The Taliban were still nowhere to be seen downtown. We headed home, passing the palace gates, where there were still some guards outside. Jim and I had looped the whole Green Zone: the ugly concrete maws of its compounds stood open, the barriers upraised. Across the city, soldiers and police officers took off their uniforms, laid down their weapons and walked off into the evening light.
Men believed to be escaped prisoners (right) passing Afghan special forces (background), still in uniform and searching cars, on Aug. 15.
At Karzai’s house, a group of his advisers listened in dismay as the palace guards arrived and announced that Ghani and his entourage had fled. Karzai had planned to help negotiate the transfer of power; now the guards asked him to take charge of the palace. Abdul Karim Khurram, his former minister of information, was present and told me that Karzai declined, saying he had no legal basis to do so. They tried calling senior officials, including the minister of defense, but those they spoke to were in hiding or had already escaped to the airport. But Karzai chose to stay. He recorded a video, which they posted on Facebook that afternoon. In it, he stands with his three young daughters in front of him; the girls seem blissfully unaware, giggling as the littlest one tries to squirm away. “Citizens of Kabul, my family and I are here with you,” Karzai said, straining to raise his voice over the roar of jets and helicopters. “I call on the security forces and the Taliban to ensure the security of the lives and property of the people.”
Khurram said they were worried about what would happen once word of Ghani’s escape became public. Already, the situation in the city was deteriorating rapidly. According to a police officer who was monitoring the radio network that day, by lunchtime many of Kabul’s police stations had been abandoned, becoming targets of large, organized groups of looters. Around 4 p.m., the home of the deputy interior minister was visited by a convoy of armed men driving Rangers and Humvees they had taken from a nearby station. They were flying the Taliban flag, but the police officer who was present told me he recognized them — they were from a criminal gang from nearby Shakardara District. When he asked for a receipt for the vehicles and weapons they were seizing, they put a gun to his head.
That afternoon, as the situation grew increasingly chaotic in Kabul, Khalilzad convened a meeting in Doha with the Taliban leadership and Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of Central Command, who had flown in to explain the American plan for evacuation to his former enemies. They met in Khalilzad’s suite at the top of the Ritz Carlton; the two sides faced off across a table — on one, the craggy Marine four-star general, an Alabama native; on the other, Mullah Baradar, dressed in a long robe.
According to two people who were present, McKenzie gave a presentation about his mission to evacuate U.S. citizens and their allies. He spread two maps out on the table. One showed a narrow corridor between the U.S. Embassy and the airport, where his forces would be active. The second had a 30-kilometer radius drawn around the center of Kabul; any move by the Taliban into that zone, McKenzie warned them, would be interpreted as a hostile act. Baradar and the other Taliban leaned over the map, trying to find the names of the areas inside the 30-kilometer circle, which extended well past the gates of Kabul.
We already have some people inside there, Baradar answered.
McKenzie told him to withdraw their forces.
Baradar replied that the Taliban had no intention of interfering with the American evacuation. But the situation on the ground had changed. They all knew by now that Ghani had fled and that the republic’s forces were collapsing. Khalilzad and the Taliban had been getting messages from Afghan politicians in Kabul, begging for someone to take charge of security before the looting and violence got worse. Everyone feared what might happen come nightfall.
Who is going to take responsibility for Kabul — are you? Baradar asked.
Khalilzad and McKenzie looked at each other. My mission is what I described, the general said.
Baradar persisted, saying he wanted to know who would ensure security for the people of Kabul. He pointed a finger at McKenzie: Are you, general?
It was hard to know if the Taliban were serious in asking the United States to take over security in Kabul; according to the Biden administration, it would have required a massive troop deployment and was never considered as an option.
McKenzie repeated that he had his mission, and that was it.
In that case, Baradar asked, what if the Taliban went in and took over security?
There was a pause as the two sides conferred among themselves. Finally, McKenzie indicated the second map, with its narrow corridor. As long as there was no interference with his mission, the general said, he had “no opinion” on that.
It was nearly 5 p.m. when Jim and I returned home on our bicycles. Our driver, Akbar, was waiting for us; the streets were clear, so we decided to drive to the western outskirts of the city, where the main Taliban advance would be arriving from Wardak Province.
Traffic was light until we hit the main arterial road that runs west, where a stream of cars was leaving the city. As Akbar crept up the on-ramp, we got down and walked to the start of the driveway of the Intercontinental Hotel. The cops here had changed into robes as well, but still had their weapons. We introduced ourselves as journalists.
“The war’s over!” one said. He laughed. “We’ve surrendered.”
“You surrendered?” I asked “To whom?”
They smiled and pointed to a bearded man sitting in their midst; he had a black scarf over his head and was wearing white high tops. He carried a Kalashnikov and a radio. A Talib, the first we’d seen that day. He returned our greetings gruffly. Jim asked to take a photo, and he assented. He was from Wardak, and spoke a little Dari.
“How long have you been a mujahed?” I said.
“Eighteen years,” he said.
I asked if he had anything to tell the public.
“Don’t worry. We have no problem with ordinary people. All that’s propaganda.”
“What about the foreigners at the airport?”
“The foreigners should go. We don’t have any need for them,” he said. He’d assumed I was Afghan. “If you and I can make peace, then what do we need them for?”
Afghan police posing with two Taliban members in front of the Intercontinental Hotel on Aug. 15.
The police had the giddiness of condemned men granted a reprieve; they crowded shyly around the Talib, who seemed annoyed by his duty but not in the least concerned about being surrounded by armed men who would have shot him a day ago. The cops wanted to pose for a photo with him. After Jim snapped it, the Talib waved us away. “Our leaders said we’re not supposed to give interviews.”
By now the car had made it up the on-ramp, and we got back in and headed to the western edge of the city, a predominantly Pashtun neighborhood called Company. The area drew rural migrants, many of whom were sympathetic to the insurgents. As we approached, we could see crowds gathered by the side of the road, cheering. A youth with a scarf wrapped around his face stood in the intersection, waving a white banner with handwritten Arabic script: THERE IS NO GOD BUT GOD AND MUHAMMAD IS HIS PROPHET.
A tan Ford Ranger drove by, with armed Taliban fighters sitting inside. Several more police and army vehicles followed, including Humvees and four-and-half-ton trucks; the Taliban on board were holding American rifles, M-16s and M-4s. They were carrying booty out of the city, back to their lines on the outskirts. The crowd of men, mostly young, was whistling and cheering; packs of little children ran after the trucks, trying to jump aboard the rear bumper. Jim had his camera out; the Taliban were happy to be photographed.
More fighters roared by on motorcycles, armed and blaring autotuned taranas, Islamic chants, from their cellphones. At the main Company roundabout, there was an immense crowd cheering: “Long live the Taliban.”
A young man waving a white Taliban flag in Kabul on Aug. 15.
After flying for more than an hour, the three presidential helicopters arrived at the Uzbekistan border and landed; confusion ensued at the Termez airport as they were surrounded by soldiers — the Uzbek government had apparently not been informed of their arrival. Eventually, the president, his wife, Mohib and several aides were taken to the governor’s guesthouse, but the rest of the 50 or so people on board spent a miserable night out in the open by the helicopters, relieving themselves on the tarmac. The next day, a charter flight arrived and took them all to Abu Dhabi.
The U.A.E., which had deep business ties with Kabul’s elite, was a close ally of Ghani’s; according to three sources within the administration, Abu Dhabi had secretly helped fund his election campaigns. (The U.A.E. did not respond to a request for comment.) What exactly was discussed at that meeting between the U.A.E. official, Ghani and Mohib that morning remains a matter of speculation. Mohib told me that “we discussed an evacuation plan for the future, but not for that day.”
For many Afghans, their president’s flight from the country was a stunning act of cowardice and betrayal that plunged the capital into chaos. Days later, Ghani, in a statement posted to Twitter, promised to explain his actions in detail in the future and said he had left to avoid provoking a civil war. “Leaving Kabul was the most difficult decision of my life,” he wrote, “but I believed it was the only way to keep the guns silent and save Kabul and her 6 million citizens.”
Mohib made a similar argument to me, writing that the Afghan security forces were “no longer a consolidated force within our control at that point. Keeping security of the city without mobilizing militias and aerial bombardment was not possible, and we were not prepared to do that.”
In retrospect, it’s clear that the breakdown of Kabul’s command and control, along with mass desertions by government forces, was already underway by the time Ghani fled. But it also seems obvious that the president was not in immediate danger. His guard force was intact, and the Taliban were still nowhere near the palace that afternoon.
“It was the safest place in Afghanistan,” said Bek, his chief of staff.
Around 6:30, the news of Ghani’s escape finally broke. Around the same time, the Taliban published a second statement: “The Islamic Emirate has ordered its forces to enter the areas of Kabul that have been abandoned by the enemy, in order prevent thieves and looters from harming the people. … Mujahedeen are not allowed to enter anyone’s home, or harass anyone.”
The sudden fall of the city had caught the Taliban leadership without adequate forces on hand. Their men had been busy with capturing the neighboring provinces that same day; coordination was difficult, as many commanders avoided the use of phones and radio during daylight hours, for fear of airstrikes by the Afghan air force. The first Taliban units were scrambled into Kabul in the late afternoon, and headed for key locations like the army and intelligence headquarters, where they were aided by sleeper cells and sympathizers that emerged from hiding. But it took until sunset to collect a force of several hundred men in Wardak, who did not make it into town until well after dark.
In all, according to one senior Taliban commander’s estimate, the rebels took command of Kabul with well under a thousand men — less than the number of Marines at the airport, let alone the tens of thousands of Afghan security forces who had deserted their posts.
That night, the street in front of the palace gate was dark and empty as a Taliban convoy arrived, followed by an Al Jazeera Arabic crew they had summoned to witness their entry. Hamdullah Mokhles, the commander in charge, was a deputy to a senior leader from Helmand — in the end, it was the southern forces, and not the Haqqanis, who had the honor of entering the palace. Accompanying him was Salahuddin Ayubi, the military chief for the central zone, who had captured Wardak that morning, and a former Guantánamo detainee, Gholam Ruhani.
They waited for one of the palace guards to arrive, a general named Mohammadullah Andar. He unlocked the gate for them shortly after 10 p.m.; as they walked inside, Andar nervously told the journalists that he had been at the airport, hoping to escape, when one of Ghani’s officials in Doha, Masoom Stanekzai, had called him and told him to hand over the palace to the Taliban, promising him he’d be safe.
They arrived at a locked gate, to which Andar didn’t have a key. Hameedullah Shah, the Al Jazeera team’s producer, told me he suggested they go a different route, through Ariana Square, past the evacuated embassy and C.I.A. station. Ruhani replied that was a “red zone,” using the English term, and that the Americans might bomb them if they did. Instead, Mokhles, the leader, pulled out a pistol and shot open the lock.
Andar led the group deeper into the palace, into Ghani’s office. There they found the desk where, that same afternoon, the Afghan president had recorded his message to reassure the people. On it was a book of poems from an Afghan singer. As the cameras rolled, Mokhles and Ayubi sat down at the desk while a fighter recited a Victory Surah from the Quran:
Indeed, we have granted you a clear triumph, O Prophet.
Taliban fighters on the back of a pickup truck in Kabul on Aug. 20.
Part 3
The Evacuation
In the days after the fall of Kabul, it sometimes felt as if we were living in two cities. In one, the streets were quiet, and people stayed home, afraid of the Taliban fighters with their turbans and long hair standing guard outside military compounds and shuttered embassies. In the other, the one the world was watching on TV, desperate crowds surged against the walls surrounding the airport as gunshots rang out.
I was receiving a constant stream of messages from Afghans asking for help escaping the country. Some were old friends; others, people I’d met once and interviewed. As a Westerner working in the developing world, I was used to my powerlessness in such matters. Usually, the most I could do was help people fill out the complex paperwork needed for programs like the Special Immigrant Visa. For years now, the West had been stepping up measures to keep Afghan asylum seekers out, making it almost impossible for them to get tourist visas, canceling study programs, paying countries like Turkey to build walls and even, in the case of Australia, detaining them on remote Pacific islands. Just 10 days earlier, six E.U. countries, including Germany, had warned against halting deportations of Afghans, saying that it sent “the wrong signal.” The evacuation — a collection of national efforts under the American military umbrella — was initially meant for countries’ own citizens, green-card and visa holders, and a limited group of locals, mostly current and former employees.
That changed the night of Aug. 15, when thousands of desperate Afghans overran the civilian terminal and spilled out onto the tarmac. On Monday morning, a U.S. Air Force C-17 was filmed taking off through the crowd. Several people were crushed under the wheels, while others, clinging to the underside of the jet, fell to their deaths as it lifted off. As these images played to a global audience riveted by the drama at the airport, the West, in a paroxysm of regret, opened its arms to Afghan refugees. Already, Canada had announced that it would take 20,000 people, a figure it would later double. Other countries followed suit, and the United States set up giant transit camps in Doha and other military bases overseas, to process Afghan evacuees for resettlement.
Crowds outside the main entrance of Hamid Karzai International Airport on Aug. 16.
Although the West wanted to save Afghans from the Taliban, the evacuation could take place only with their tacit support. Their harried young fighters had taken over the southern, civilian side of the airport perimeter, where they used warning shots and whips to prevent the mob from overrunning the airfield, as they had on the first day. On the northern, military side, the line was held by Marines and the Zero Units.
With each day, even as people were shot and trampled at the gates, the crowds grew larger and more frenzied, some arriving from distant provinces. A few petitioners already had resettlement cases, like the interpreters I’d met the day of the fall, but many more came bearing some piece of paper they hoped would qualify them for evacuation — a certificate given to them years ago by the Marines in Helmand, a photograph from a conference for female activists or a U.N. observer’s card from a past, disputed election. There was a widespread belief that if you could only get inside the airport, you’d make it to Germany or Canada, and in fact, many had gotten out in the chaos of the first night, when, in order to clear the runway, people were bundled onto planes indiscriminately and flown to Doha.
For years, Afghans had been paying smugglers to cross deserts and mountains, risking their lives to reach Europe’s hostile frontiers. The desperate scenes around the airport — families, half-dead from dehydration, being tear-gassed and beaten by men with guns — reminded me of what I witnessed when I traveled the smuggler’s road five years earlier, during Europe’s border crisis. Now the border was here in Kabul, manned by the Zero Units and the Taliban.
A convoy of Zero Units heading to the airport on Aug. 16.
For many Westerners who had been involved with Afghanistan over the past 20 years and were watching this disaster from abroad, the only way to do something was to help the Afghans they knew to escape. They tried lobbying their home governments, but some turned to direct action. A group of my friends connected to Sayara, a research-and-communications company that contracted with the U.S. government, had gotten together to try to evacuate Sayara’s local staff and others at risk. The list grew as they found donors who were willing to help get more people out — journalists, women’s rights activists and even members of the girls’ robotics team, whose faces had been painted on the wall outside the U.S. Embassy.
Soon they had raised more than a million dollars from places like the Rockefeller Foundation, enough to fly their own charter plane in. They got permission from the Ugandan government to bring people there while they waited for resettlement. Then they tried to get access to the airport; they started with the State Department and the military, but in the end it was another friend of theirs, a writer and former C.I.A. officer, who succeeded. He worked his contacts at the agency, whose paramilitary branch was playing a key role in the evacuation.
They needed someone on the ground in Kabul to get a convoy to the airport. They’d been in touch with me, asking for information; I’d been getting around through the crowds on my motorcycle and had a sense of what was going on there. Now one of my friends called and asked if I’d be willing to lead the buses in.
They explained who would be on the convoy: some local journalists I knew, some women from shelters that might be shut down by the Taliban. There would be four minibuses with more than a hundred people on board, many of them young children or elderly men and women. I knew that I was in a unique position to help them and that, in their desperation, they would go whether or not I did. So I said yes.
Two old friends had also volunteered, Andrew Quilty and Victor Blue, photojournalists who’d stayed behind in Kabul. The plan was to assemble the evacuees at the Serena Hotel downtown, and then drive to the airport. There was no way we could get through the crowds and traffic during the day, but if we left late enough at night, the roads might be clearer.
I’d ridden around the airport that afternoon to get a sense of the layout. On the north side, there was a road that ran along a wide sewage canal. Across the water, Hesco barriers and concrete walls were topped with guard towers, and on one I saw something I hadn’t seen in days: the tricolor of the republic, fluttering in the breeze.
While the army and police had surrendered and deserted en masse around the country, the Zero Units had remained mostly intact. There was already a large force at Eagle Base, the C.I.A.’s paramilitary compound in northern Kabul, which the Taliban had agreed not to attack during the evacuation; the agency had helped rescue some of the units; others made their own way to the airport. One was the Orgun Strike Force from the southeastern border, which had participated in some of the United States’ most secret missions, including covert operations inside Pakistan’s tribal areas across the border. They were led by a longhaired, mustachioed commander whose operations that summer I’d been following on an Afghan government Facebook page. (A U.S. official requested that he not be identified by name, to protect his family.) The Orgun commander and his unit were given the ugly job of crowd control on the perimeter.
Coming around the north side of the airport, still a long way from the main military gate, I hit a traffic jam, and as I threaded the bike through I saw the reason. The Zero troopers, in their desert tiger camo, had taken over the road. They stood in front of a narrow passage formed by concrete blast walls. This new entrance, which some dubbed Glory Gate, was supposed to be a low-profile one for U.S. citizens and other priority cases, but large crowds were gathering there. When people pushed too close, the troopers fired shots in the air or brandished steel cables. A few days before, the crowd had gotten inside, and videos on social media showed the Zero troopers forcing them back, firing live ammunition overhead, women and kids screaming, a man bleeding in the dust.
Families desperate to leave gathered outside the airport while U.S. Marines guarded the perimeter on Aug. 22.
Around 7 that evening, Vic and Quilty came to pick me up in a taxi. On our way to the Serena, we discussed the latest news: There’d been a report that ISIS was planning to attack the airport. The threat was real, but who knew how imminent it actually was? In any case, it wasn’t going away. We arrived at the luxury hotel, which had been targeted several times by the Taliban. In one attack in 2014, my friend Sardar Ahmad, an Afghan journalist, was killed along with his wife and two of his children. It was unsettling when the door opened to reveal several bearded men with Kalashnikovs: the hotel’s new Taliban security. We were led in with a group of evacuees, where a Talib searched my bag, before letting me through to the scanner.
“Pretty funny, huh?” I muttered to Vic as we walked through the hotel’s driveway, passing more fighters.
“This is insane,” Vic replied.
In fact, the Serena was now one of the safest places in town, thanks to the Qatari Embassy, which had moved in earlier that year. The Qataris’ strategy of hosting the Taliban’s political office had paid off; they’d become a key intermediary between the West and the Islamists, and were now running their own evacuation convoys through the Taliban-controlled civilian gate.
As we entered the lobby, we could see Qatari special forces in black polo shirts with pistols. They had a convoy going tonight, and among the evacuees, I spotted Bilal Sarwary, a former BBC reporter, standing by the reception desk. We embraced.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“Not very good and not very bad — in between,” he said, and laughed. “The time to process will come.”
Passengers lining up to board an evacuation convoy from the Serena Hotel to the airport on Aug. 24.
Sayara had rented a hall in the back where, over the next few hours, our own evacuees assembled, around 140 people. I was surprised at how many kids there were. I stood at the front and introduced myself and Vic and Quilty, explaining we were going to get them safely to the airport. Looking at the rows of anxious faces, I tried to smile back with a confidence I didn’t feel.
Although I hadn’t put anyone on the list myself, it turned out that I knew a few of the people in our convoy. One of them was Ramin, the poet who’d recited at the party two months ago, sitting with a young woman with pale skin and high cheekbones.
“This is my wife,” he said, standing up to greet me.
When I met Ramin earlier that summer, they had already been engaged; when Kabul fell, the two got married so that they could escape together, in a tiny home ceremony where they played music on a mobile phone, with the volume turned down in case a Taliban patrol passed by.
“Are you planning to leave, too?” Ramin asked.
I explained that I was coming back with the buses, along with Quilty and Vic.
“Our friends have suffered a lot,” Ramin said. “Please be careful.” The previous day, he and his wife went to one of the gates controlled by the Zero Units, where the crowd had been tear-gassed and they were nearly trampled. He went home, hopeless, and tried to fall asleep; when he got up, he learned that a friend from France had put him on the list for this convoy.
I was wondering about him the day before and, on a whim, I’d left him a voice message and recited one of his poems. “Yesterday, when you sent me the message, I was in the crowd,” he said. “You read it very well.”
“Thank you. It’s a beautiful poem,” Before the fall, I had hoped to translate his work, but I’d only managed to commit one to memory, a love poem:
I’ll stay with you like a scent on the body,
I’ll stay with you like a half-forgotten song.
One of the buses in the convoy.
At 2 a.m., the scout car that we sent ahead reported back: There was still a traffic jam outside the main military entrance, but the road was clear in front of Glory Gate. Sayara was in touch with a C.I.A. contact at the airport, and soon after, I got a call from someone who introduced himself as one of the Orgun commander’s men, telling us to come.
It was shortly after 3 a.m. when we rolled out of Serena’s gates. I chugged my third energy drink of the night and lit a cigarette. The city center was deserted. I was in the lead bus, and our driver decided to take a shortcut behind the old attorney general’s office, where there was a height barrier intended to keep out trucks. As we passed under it, there was a crunch, and he slammed on the brakes. When he tried reversing, the metal roof began to shriek in protest. He’d wedged us under the barrier.
Twenty yards ahead, I saw a green laser sweep the road and fix on our bus. Three turbaned figures, carrying rifles, stepped out from the shadows and headed toward us.
“It’s the Taliban,” someone behind me whispered.
The other buses drove around us, where the barrier was higher, and sped off. Our driver was reversing back and forth, trying to get us unstuck, but the lead Talib broke into a jog and raised his hand for us to stop.
“Salaam alaikum,” I called out the window, trying to smile.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“The airport,” I said.
He stared inside at the bus crammed full of families with their luggage. “Mawlawi sahib!” He called to his commander. “They’re going to the airport.” The other waved us away.
“Be careful you don’t get shot,” the Talib said.
The convoy hit traffic close to a gate guarded by the C.I.A. and Afghan Zero Units.
We got out from under the barrier, made a U-turn and took another street, where we linked up with the other three buses, and sped onward to the airport road. No more checkpoints. Soon we saw the neon lights of the gas station across from Glory Gate. I was worried about the trigger-happy troopers, and the mob outside. I texted the group to remind them to lock the windows.
“We’re close, slow down.”
The road was clear, but there were still hundreds of people hanging around the dirt lots along the road. Clouds of dust whirled up as we approached; the floodlights from the gate cast the shadows of concertina wire through the murk. A Zero trooper came forward and leveled his rifle at my bus.
“Get out of here!” he screamed. “Go!”
“We’re the Sayara convoy!” I shouted back. Leaning out the window, I recited the names we’d been given by the C.I.A.
Hearing them, the trooper dropped his barrel, and motioned for us to wait. After a few minutes, another came forward and took my passport. They had us pull forward, out of the road. Then I saw a bearded figure come from the gate, his muscular calves apparent under his shorts — an unusual sight since Afghans don’t wear shorts in public. He shone a flashlight on me, then on my passport.
“Hey, how are you?” he said in English. He asked about where we’d come from and who the passengers were.
“It’s all civilians,” I said.
“Well, you came to the right gate,” he said, and grinned.
He was an American operator, most likely with the C.I.A.’s paramilitary branch. He explained that we’d unload the buses, one at a time, so that the passengers could go through on foot to be searched. Then we’d load up again on the other side, and head into the airport.
I stood to the side and watched as the passengers, many still terrified, filed off and went inside. With the floodlights behind me now, the Zero troopers seemed forlorn in the dust, the remnants of a once mighty army, now carrying out a final, grim duty. Occasionally, there was a crack of gunfire: more warning shots against the crowd. Seated in a plastic chair by the gate was a large man with a drooping mustache. He was looking down at his phone, listening to a voice message.
He looked familiar. I asked if he was the Orgun commander.
He turned his exhausted gaze up to me. “Yes,” he said.
“I recognized you from your Facebook photos,” I said. So this was the man who’d been the scourge of the borderlands.
He smiled sadly. “Thank you.”
It took half an hour to get all four buses through the gate. As the last passengers were being checked, I walked over to where Vic was waiting. It was almost 4:30, and the dawn prayer was being called. A chorus of barking dogs rose from the wastes around us.
The second operator led us in his truck as we drove through the concrete passageways, past a blasted-out armored vehicle, through an inner gate manned by U.S. Army soldiers, until we finally reached the edge of the tarmac. A vast panorama opened before us: the lights of distant planes, like ships on the open sea, and in the foreground, the hulking airframes of C-17s and C-130s, their ramps down, lines of refugees walking onboard. Far to the south, we could see the civilian terminal. The sound of jet engines was deafening.
Our buses followed the C.I.A. truck to the military terminal, where there were U.S. Marines everywhere; some standing guard on the flight line, others crashed along a fence, sleeping against their rucksacks. There were soldiers from other NATO countries as well, sent to evacuate their nationals and local staff. Afghans sat together in groups, wherever they could find an open space to rest amid drifts of trash, empty water bottles and rations.
Now we had to get our evacuees to their plane, so that we could go home; I’d been told Sayara’s charter flight was already on the tarmac. The buses pulled to a halt next to a disabled Afghan Air Force C-130, a few hundred yards from the terminal. The operator, a burly man in a baseball T-shirt, got down from his truck and came over to me.
“I would not take these people out of the bus,” he said. He looked at the military planes around us. “Civilian charter. … I don’t see a civilian charter.”
As we walked toward the terminal, he explained that Marines were kicking some people off who didn’t have proper documents; we didn’t want to get the Sayara group mixed up with the others. “There’s around 20,000 people on this base right now, waiting for flights,” he said.
At the terminal, the Marine in charge, a harried lieutenant colonel, was polite, but said he didn’t know where to put our group, either. We were the C.I.A.’s responsibility; the operator suggested that he and I drive over their compound to figure things out, so I got into his armored pickup.
Dawn was breaking on the tarmac. He blinked with fatigue as he explained that he arrived a couple of days before, part of a team rushed to help out with the evacuation. “Everybody thought that it was going to last longer,” he said. “We knew it was gonna fall, but we thought months.”
“Have you been here before?” I asked.
“Double-digit times, man. You lose count.”
He said the C.I.A. had been pulling people out all over the country: American citizens and important assets, often through touch-and-go missions into Taliban-held territory.
A C.I.A. spokeswoman later told me, “The C.I.A. worked closely with other U.S. government agencies to support in various ways the evacuation of thousands of American citizens, local embassy staff and vulnerable Afghans.”
We arrived at an area with several hangars that the C.I.A. had taken over. Two C-17s were loading at its ramp, with a long line of men, women and children behind each, carrying bags and bundles. The Zero Units were allowed to bring their immediate family members, and the operator said that given the large size of Afghan families, it would add up to thousands. Each C-17 could carry 400 people, and one had to get out every two hours. They were already behind.
The Sayara team had finally sent me the tail number for their charter plane, so we decided to go over to the civilian side of the airport and see if we could find it.
We drove around the west end of the runway. The operator stopped and looked both ways for jets before we crossed. “I don’t know who’s in some of these buildings,” he said. The airport was a mess. The Taliban were supposed to stay on the outside of the civilian terminal, but the perimeter was worryingly porous.
“There’s a Kam Air flight there,” he said.
A jet with orange livery was parked on the tarmac. We got closer and read the tail number; it was the right plane, but it did not look as if it would be flying any time soon.
My phone buzzed again, and I read a message from my friend at Sayara aloud: “Hey I just talked to the plane people, and this charter is far from secured. It might be days.”
We circled around in the truck.
“Huh,” he finally said. We headed back to the C.I.A. ramp, where the C-17s were still loading. Inside the hangars, I could see masses of bedding and garbage. “It’s a humanitarian disaster,” he sighed. He seemed bitter about the way the Zero Units had given up the fight, like the rest of the Afghan forces.
He was coming off his shift, so he handed me off to a colleague, another bearded operator, who dropped me off in a hangar to wait on instructions from above about what to do with Sayara evacuees. Three young Marines sat at a folding table in front of laptops, registering Zero troopers and their families.
I poured myself some coffee and sat down, watching the scene. The contrast with the military’s side of the airport, where there were Marines everywhere, was revealing; here, around a dozen C.I.A. paramilitary officers were handling thousands of locals, many of them armed but obedient. Their faithfulness was being rewarded with passage to America. And as the only Afghan forces who controlled part of the perimeter, they had the ability to bring their own people inside. I wondered how these men, who had been fighting a vicious battle in the borderlands with Al Qaeda and ISIS, would adjust to life in the United States.
The operator returned with a clamshell full of pancakes and sausage, which I wolfed down gratefully. We discussed what to do with the Sayara convoy; the best solution seemed to be to leave them with the Marines, after all. We drove back over to the buses and pulled around to the entrance, where everyone got down with their bags. We still needed to find somewhere for them, for the long wait ahead; I spotted a Marine sergeant, and explained the situation, as we had to his colonel a few hours ago. He was a young guy with red hair and a raspy voice.
“Yeah, how about right there?” he said, pointing to a small outdoor waiting area next to the terminal. He grabbed a couple of his Marines, and within a few minutes they had kicked out some others hanging around to make room for all 140 of Sayara’s evacuees.
We said goodbye and wished them luck, and then Vic, Quilty and I got back on the buses and rode back into the city. The sun was bright, and the crowds were already starting to gather — the few with papers to get inside and the many without them.
Families, most likely relatives of Zero Unit fighters, making their way into the airport to be evacuated on Aug. 24.
As August reached its end and America’s self-imposed deadline for the evacuation neared, the violence at the airport grew more frenzied. Sayara asked us to lead another convoy two days later, this time with five buses. We made it to Glory Gate in the early hours of the morning, but this time Sayara’s connection to the C.I.A. failed. The operator on duty, one we had seen before, refused to let us through. Sitting outside in the buses, I watched a huge convoy arrive from nearby Eagle Base, which the C.I.A. was getting ready to blow up.
The Orgun commander was gone, one of the troopers outside said. He seemed high on something; his pupils were enormous. He giggled and fluttered his hand. “He flew away.”
Our friends at Sayara tried to work their contacts with the U.S. government, sending us to different gates as daylight broke and the crowds grew. One of our buses broke down; a mob tried to break inside; we made a last-ditch attempt at the Taliban-controlled gate, but when I got down to try talk with them, a fighter started punching me in the head. In the end, we were lucky to get everyone back to the Serena alive.
On Aug. 26, an ISIS suicide bomber made his way through the crowd to the Marines at Abbey Gate and detonated his vest, killing 13 American troops. Jim and I went down to the site and then to the emergency hospital, where they were bringing in bodies on stretchers. Almost 200 people were killed; it seemed like too many for a single bomber. Some might have been trampled or drowned in the sewage ditch; according to several witnesses I spoke to, the Marines, who must have feared another bomber, also fired on those who panicked and tried to climb the walls. A doctor at a government hospital said that many of the casualties he saw had bullet wounds. (A spokesman said there was no evidence the Marines shot anyone during the evacuation.)
Three days later, the United States carried out a drone strike inside the city, on what it said was another ISIS terrorist. The top U.S. general told the public it was a “righteous strike.” We went to the house the next morning, where, in a courtyard strewn with a charred sedan and bits of flesh, a family and their neighbors wept in rage and grief. The drone’s Hellfire had killed 10 innocent people, seven of them children, as the military would later admit. That was the last known missile fired in what they once called the good war.
A man wounded in an explosion near the airport on Aug. 26.
Nightfall brought an intensification of air traffic; I’d lie in bed and listen to the planes, trying to distinguish the roar of C-17s and fighter jets, the buzz of Reaper drones, the hum of a C-130’s propellers as it climbed from the tarmac. The night of Aug. 30 was the busiest we’d heard it yet, and then, shortly before midnight, it tapered off. Jim and I walked out into the yard and marveled at the quiet. Then we heard scattered gunshots, followed by more, until it sounded as if we were at the center of a raging gun battle. Every Talib in the city was firing into the air, celebrating the departure of the last American soldier. From our window, we could see red tracer fire crisscrossing above the city, deadly fireworks.
The next morning, the Taliban held a news conference at the airport. Their soldiers at the gate let us through; Jim and I walked down the long avenue, brass cartridges scattered underfoot. Heaps of suitcases, their contents emptied into piles, littered the median. The terminal parking lot was a snarl of abandoned vehicles left behind, ordinary cars, U.N. four-by-fours and armored S.U.V.s, some flipped on their sides or parked nose to nose as barricades: One big GM, blocking the road sideways, had its plated window punched open by gunfire. The Taliban guards here were just waking up from last night’s party; they had a big dog with them, probably one of the many left behind during the evacuation; the terminal was full of shattered glass, its furniture overturned, pallets of water bottles and M.R.E.s scattered around. It was like a hurricane-ravaged, abandoned coast.
The ceremony was on the military side, so the Taliban gave us a ride in the bed of a truck that had belonged to a Zero Unit, the kid at the wheel speeding recklessly across the tarmac, taking us to where the officials were giving a victory speech in front of a listing, disabled C-130. Their special forces were lined up, wearing helmets and uniforms. Suddenly, we heard a bang, and I turned to see two Rangers colliding out on the runway, one rolling and flipping high into the air before it crashed down. The ceremony went on.
Afterward, Jim and I walked back out through the gate; and stood staring at the roundabout where traffic was flowing normally. Apart from a small group of onlookers, the crowds were gone. The spell was broken.
“There aren’t any foreigners inside?” a street kid asked. He had a can of incense on a wire.
“No,” I said. “They’re gone.”
Taliban fighters at a news conference at the airport on Aug. 31.
Part 4
The Emirate
After the fall of the capital, it took time to get used to seeing Taliban at the checkpoint outside our house. In the days that followed, their scarce numbers in Kabul were bolstered by fighters from the provinces, arriving with the long hair and beards that would have gotten them profiled for arrest in the capital not long ago. Young, off-duty Taliban wandered around, clutching their weapons and staring at the bright lights and gaudy storefronts, while the city dwellers looked back warily. Although the Taliban rank and file had been ordered not to harass residents, the men of Kabul swapped jeans for traditional garb, while the women wore concealing clothes, if they ventured out at all. Abandoned by their leaders and security forces, the capital’s residents waited for what would befall them under the Islamic Emirate.
On Aug. 17, just two days after they captured Kabul, the Taliban held their first news conference. Jim and I rode down to the government media center, located inside the former Green Zone, where we found a line of local reporters waiting outside, their tailored suits traded for robes. Inside, we sat in front of a dais flanked by marble staircases, waiting for Zabihullah Mujahed, the longtime Taliban spokesman, whose voice we knew but whose face we’d never seen. After a moment, Mujahed and his aides descended stage left. He took his seat in front of the microphones. A diminutive, well-spoken man, he wore a turban in a tribal pattern from eastern Afghanistan. He announced that the Taliban would keep their promise of an afwa, the general amnesty.
“We have pardoned all those who had fought against us,” he said. “The Islamic Emirate does not have any animosity with anyone. The fighting has come to an end, and we want to live in peace.”
Zabihullah Mujahid (top left), the Taliban’s spokesman, on Aug. 17 at their first news conference after they took control of Kabul.
For a movement confident in its victory, and in need of domestic and international support, the announcement made sense. And despite dire expectations, Kabul had fallen with remarkably little bloodshed. There were no massacres or roundups, and so far the few high-profile politicians who hadn’t evacuated, like Karzai, had been left in peace. “You thought the Taliban were going to devour and kill everyone, but that didn’t happen,” Ayubi, one of the commanders who’d taken over the palace, told me. Afghans were tired of war, he said, and the Emirate wanted to halt the cycle of killings and retribution that had raged for four decades.
But even if the leadership was sincere, could they control their fighters? I met a young commander named Mullah Sangin who, like many of the Taliban in the city, rushed here from a neighboring province after the fall. Sangin was from Wardak’s Tangi Valley, and he told me he was one of a few survivors from a group that had shot down a helicopter carrying Navy SEALs there in 2011. Tall and gaunt, wearing a black turban, Sangin was only in his late 20s but now led a group of a couple of dozen men within the intelligence commission. Restaurants and other businesses had started to reopen in the capital, and we ate lunch at the same spot where I’d gone with the interpreters the day the city fell. The staff was surprised to see me arrive with the Talib commander and his Kalashnikov-toting driver. Sangin and I sat across from each other, smiling at how surreal it was to be meeting like this. I was the first non-Muslim he’d ever shared a meal with, he told me; he was used to thinking of foreigners as invaders. “But you’re a guest in our country,” he said.
This summer, as the prospect of victory began to seem real, the leadership had emphasized the order to spare the life and property of those who surrendered. During the Eid al-Adha celebration in July, the amir, Haibatullah Akhunzada, had disseminated a message over WhatsApp explaining that a general amnesty would be granted once the Taliban were victorious, just as the Prophet Muhammad had done after capturing Mecca 14 centuries earlier. Sangin said it even included the Zero Units, his mortal enemies, who were still guarding the evacuation in progress at the airport.
“We were greatly wronged by them, but we will forgive them, because when the amir gives an order, we must obey,” he told me. He referred to the religious concept of eta’at; disobedience to one’s amir was a sin. But Haibatullah, a religious scholar from Kandahar, had yet to appear in public, and Sangin and his men, like the rest of the country, were waiting to see what kind of government the Taliban would institute. He was certain about one thing: It would be an emirate, not a republic. “Our constitution is the Quran and Islam,” he told me.
Mullah Sangin, a Taliban commander, at a restaurant in central Kabul in November.
When I showed up at Rangina’s house, there were no guards outside anymore, and her government-issued armored S.U.V. was gone from the driveway. When the Taliban had taken it, they’d assured her she would be safe. But she was getting ready to evacuate; there was only a week remaining until Aug. 31, the deadline for the troops to leave, and she and Abdullah had decided to take Zara and get out.
The day before, Rangina had been invited to a meeting at the ministry with members of the Taliban’s education commission. Schools were closed since the collapse of the republic, but Rangina had wondered if they might ask her to continue in a temporary capacity, like Waheed Majrooh, the minister of public health, who’d remained and helped keep the hospitals running through the violence at the airport. Rangina arrived with her deputy to find several older men in turbans sitting in her office. They were formal but polite; one turned out to be from a village in Kandahar next to her father’s. Together, they went to speak to the ministry’s senior staff. After thanking God for their victory, one of the Taliban officials gave a speech about placing Islam at the center of a new curriculum — now their fundamentalist vision would shape the next generation of Afghan children.
Afterward, the officials served her melon in the office. She wanted to know whether girls would be denied higher education as they were in the 1990s. The Taliban assured her that they would be allowed to study past sixth grade, but only after a system was worked out to keep men and women separate, in accordance with religious law.
“I don’t know if their definition of Shariah has changed from 20 years ago or if it’s the same Shariah — that’s the big question,” Rangina told me. “Shariah is not a book that you can pick up and say, ‘Here’s Shariah.’ It’s history and laws and regulations over 1,400 years, and it’s open to interpretation.”
Khalil Haqqani (center), a senior Taliban figure, during Friday prayers at the Pul-e Kheshti Mosque in Kabul on Aug. 20.
The officials told her she no longer had a job at the ministry, but they asked her to stay in Afghanistan. They suggested she could help them by speaking to the media and telling the world they weren’t the monsters they were made out to be. Rangina was offended. “They just want me as their female spokesperson,” she said.
As a former minister and U.S. citizen, Rangina had been prioritized for evacuation. As we talked, her phone rang, and she answered it. It was a Marine, calling from the military base in Qatar. “If we can help you out, would you be willing to work with us to get through a gate in HKIA and get put on an airplane?”
The next day, her deputy, Attaullah Wahidyar, drove them in a truck to Glory Gate, with Zara sitting quietly beside her and Abdullah in the back seat. Rangina was racked with guilt over leaving; maybe if she stayed, the Taliban would be willing to listen to her. Wahidyar was certain she was making the right decision. “They would have used her,” he told me later. “You can’t say no to a Talib with a gun.”
In the back of the pickup speeding toward the airport, Rangina wept as she remembered another journey she’d taken as a scared child more than 30 years ago. In the middle of the night, her father had taken the family and fled the Communists in a truck like this one, and they’d become refugees. But now the little girl in the back seat was her own daughter, and she was sitting in her father’s place. And Ghulam Haider was dead, murdered, a martyr for the lost republic and the country she was leaving behind.
Taliban fighters in the house of a former Afghan government official in Kabul in September.
A few days after the evacuation ended, I passed by the office of Etilaat-e Roz and was surprised to find Zaki still there. A couple of weeks earlier, he’d told me that he and his staff had decided to leave while they still had a chance to get out. But they hadn’t been able to get through the crowds at the airport. Zaki had been offered a place on our Sayara convoy, but he wasn’t willing to go without his colleagues
The Qataris, who were helping the Taliban get the airport running again, were still flying out some evacuees, so Zaki was hopeful that they could leave as a group in the coming days. A few of Zaki’s journalists were sitting around the office, looking depressed. They told me they hadn’t been out reporting yet; they were afraid of the Taliban on the street. I tried to reassure them by recounting how Mujahed, the spokesman, had given me a letter of permission, and that I’d been able to keep working, even interview Taliban officials.
Two days later, I got a message from Zaki saying that some of his staff had been arrested covering a protest by women’s rights activists outside a police station. I rushed over, but by the time I got to his office, they had already been released. Two were beaten so badly that they had to be taken to the hospital, including Zaki’s younger brother, Taqi. I went over and persuaded the nervous staff to let me in; the two reporters were just being wheeled out of the X-ray department.
“Hi, Matthieu,” Nemat Naqdi whispered from his gurney. I peered at the gauze swaddling his face and realized, with a stab of guilt, that he was one of the young journalists I’d exhorted to get out and work. He and Taqi, who hadn’t gotten permits from the Taliban, were arrested at the demonstration, taken into a room and whipped. Nemat was hit so hard that he lost partial vision in his right eye.
The journalists Nemat Naqdi and Taqi Daryabi on Sept. 8. They were severely beaten after being detained by the Taliban for covering a protest in Kabul.
Taliban officials would later apologize for the incident, but no action was taken against the fighters who were now functioning as the police. According to the Taliban, public protests were illegal without a permit, and given the current emergency situation, permits would not be granted. Covering such protests was illegal, too. Although the Taliban claimed that free speech would be allowed “within the limits of Islam,” they had never made any pretense to liberalism. When I sat for an interview with Mujahed, he told me that democracy and Islam were incompatible; in the former, the people were sovereign, but according to the latter, God and the Quran ruled. In a world where even dictators paid lip service to democracy, the Taliban offered a remarkably frank vision for a religious theocracy.
And yet, like Mullah Baradar, the chief negotiator in Doha, Mujahed was seen as representing a relatively moderate tendency within the Taliban, one that advocated a pragmatic engagement with the world. There was still hope for the “inclusive” approach that had been promised under the agreement scuttled by Ghani’s escape, but the interim cabinet announced on Sept. 7 was drawn from the movement’s old guard — most were Pashtun, many were elderly clerics and all were men. The Taliban’s total military victory had strengthened its hard-liners. Baradar, who many in the West had expected to lead the new cabinet, was made a deputy.
Rangina’s replacement as acting minister of education had previously run a madrasa in Pakistan. When high schools were reopened in September, only boys were given permission to return; while in some provinces girls were also quietly allowed, as the end of the year approached, most in the country were still being kept out of school.
A Taliban education official looking in on a girls’ school in Mazar-i-Sharif in October.
The heat of the summer passed. The nights grew longer. On crisp mornings, the smell of wood smoke filled the air in Kabul. The city’s residents and the Taliban fighters were adjusting to one another; some of the jeans reappeared, while the Taliban donned a patchwork of uniforms that had belonged to the republic. When I had visited the remnants of the C.I.A.’s Eagle Base, the fighters who accompanied our group of journalists on a tour wore operator-style helmets and carried American-made weapons; some even wore the tiger stripes of the Zero Units.
In the end, nearly everyone who could leave left. Zaki and his team made it out to the transit camps in Doha to await resettlement in the United States, as did Mahdi and Nadim, the translators I interviewed the day the city fell. Ghani was in Abu Dhabi writing a book, a follow-up to “Fixing Failed States,” perhaps. Rangina moved to Arizona with Abdullah and Zara, where she was offered a teaching job at a university. The Orgun commander and the Zero Unit troopers were sent to military bases in America, where they would begin new lives as refugees. Ramin and his wife were given an artist’s residency in a French farmhouse, where he was writing of his longing for his city, a Kabul that now lived on in the imagination of a new diaspora.
Although daily life had returned to the capital’s streets, after dark they quickly emptied out, apart from the fighters standing at intersections. I stayed inside, too — my friends were gone from this city where the music had fallen silent. I was longing to get out, and finally, more than two months after the fall of Kabul, I headed south, toward Kandahar. Akbar and I took turns at the wheel; the valleys of Wardak stretched out, barren mountains behind them. We rolled down the windows and breathed the clear air, careful to turn down the stereo at checkpoints. Highway 1, which had been a battleground for more than a decade, was safe enough now to drive at night, although you had to watch for the craters from roadside bombs, which the emirate was slowly trying to patch. The farther we traveled from Kabul, the less nostalgia people seemed to have for the republic. In Panjwai, outside Kandahar City, the farmers had dug up the I.E.D.s and were planting crops. Everywhere, white flags fluttered above the graves of young men.
“Not a day would go by without dozens of bodies coming back along this road,” Akbar said. He was from a valley north of Kabul that had provided many recruits for the Afghan Army. He had never been to the south before; now he sat with farmers in pomegranate orchards, comparing their experiences on opposite sides of the war. “We thought the people here have been cruel to kill so many of our sons like that. Now I see they suffered just as much. Maybe more.”
Taliban fighters at an amusement park in Kabul during evening prayers in October.
Akbar and I drove westward to Helmand. Outside the cities, we saw few armed men. We passed the bases built with foreign money, many bearing the scars of final battles. Most were empty, with only a white flag fluttering above; some whose Hesco barriers had been raided of wire for scrap were now melting back into the earth. It felt as if the country, deprived of a constant input of dollars, was returning to a lower energy state. The economy was in free fall, the banks were out of cash; it had been a drought year, and everyone feared the hunger that winter would bring.
On the highway near Shurabak, we passed a series of concrete walls, which I recognized as the entry points for the enormous air base that had been run by the Marines. I thought about my visits there, when the runway was crowded with jets, and tried to remember the brash generals who’d explained, year after year, how they were winning — they just needed more troops, more money, more time. Twenty years had passed, long enough for a child to be raised, to finish her studies and become a young woman. That was the life span of the republic. Now the dream was over and America was gone, along with an elite that fled even before the last foreign soldier was out, leaving behind a country on the brink of starvation.
We kept driving to Nimruz and reached the Iranian border. Here the desert began. A great exodus was underway. We watched as the migrants crowded onto trucks, heading west.
Women begging on Highway 1 in Ghazni in September.
Matthieu Aikins has worked in Afghanistan since 2008 and is currently a Puffin fellow at Type Media Center. His first book, “The Naked Don’t Fear the Water: An Underground Journey With Afghan Refugees,” will be published by Harper in February. Jim Huylebroek is a photographer from Belgium who has been living in Kabul since 2015 and working for The Times since 2017. His first photo book, “Afghanistan: Unsettled,” was published in cooperation with the Norwegian Refugee Council.
12. Don’t Sell Out Ukraine
Excerpt:
Ukraine’s goal is simple: peace through strength. For now, the United States and its European allies should talk to Putin to win time while strengthening Ukraine to the extent that Russia will simply have no feasible military option for invading it. At that point, it will be possible to reach a just peace settlement for the Donbas and to finally bring Ukraine into the EU and NATO.
Both goals may seem distant now, but in the long term, the Ukrainian people will have it no other way. We will not abandon this course, no matter how much pressure we face from Russia—or from our U.S. or European partners. When I hear some Western commentators saying that NATO’s proximity is a sensitive issue for Putin, I have only one question to ask: Are the lives and future of 44 million Ukrainians not sensitive, too?
Don’t Sell Out Ukraine
The West Must Respond to Russia With Strength, Not Appeasement
Russian President Vladimir Putin has issued a stark ultimatum. In a number of recent statements, he has demanded that the United States make “reliable and firm legal guarantees” that NATO will not expand eastward—or else, his entourage has hinted, Russia will invade Ukraine. Coming at a time when Russia is massing military forces along the Ukrainian border and stymieing peace talks to end the war in the Donbas region, Putin’s demand seems to offer a tempting prospect for the West: in exchange for merely cementing the alliance’s status quo, a deadly European war could come to an end and a new, even more devastating conflict could be avoided.
But it is foolish to think that providing such a guarantee would make Putin any less aggressive. History shows that pledges of neutrality by Ukraine or any other country in the region do nothing to abate Putin’s appetite; rather, they feed it. The best way to respond to such ultimatums is to ignore them altogether.
What cannot be ignored, however, are Putin’s increasingly aggressive intentions. Not only is a new large-scale invasion of Ukraine now on the table; Putin also hopes ultimately to rearrange Europe’s security architecture to the detriment of the West. For too long, the West has declined to take Putin’s ambitions seriously and responded with delay, indecision, and weakness. It is time to meet them with strength.
PUTIN’S POWER PLAY
It is obvious why Russia demands that Ukraine give up its ambitions for membership in the European Union and NATO, but it is far less clear why anyone in the West should echo these ill-conceived suggestions. The people of Ukraine made a choice in 2013, after Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, acting at Putin’s behest, sought to contravene public opinion and integrate the country with Russia instead of the EU. In November of that year, Ukrainians took to the streets in the so-called Euromaidan protests. Yanukovych tried to suppress the demonstrations with brute force, but he underestimated the will of Ukrainians, who responded with fury, not fear, and eventually ousted him.
The message could hardly have been clearer: Ukrainians have no interest in cozying up to Russia and will never give up on integrating with the West. Putin, however, seemed not to have learned that lesson. With his client out of power and no way to change Ukraine’s orientation from within, the Russian president resorted to violence. In early 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine, occupied Crimea, and launched a deadly war in the Donbas.
Ukrainians will never give up on integrating with the West.
Russia planned a blitzkrieg with the ultimate goal of dividing Ukraine in half and establishing a puppet state called Novorossiya in Ukraine’s eight eastern regions. But Putin greatly underestimated Ukrainian resolve. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians from all regions and all walks of life raced to the frontlines to take up arms in defense of their country. They were backed by hundreds of thousands of civilian volunteers, ordinary Ukrainian citizens who supplied the army with everything from food to do-it-yourself armored vehicles. It became clear that Putin hadn’t attacked the defenseless state he had imagined; the Ukrainian people, however poorly equipped, were highly motivated. Putin’s grand designs quickly fell apart, leading to a years-long stalemate on a tiny fraction of land near the Ukrainian border. To date, the conflict has claimed more than 14,000 lives.
The West—the United States, the European Union, and NATO—did too little, too late. It took months and the deaths of 298 innocent people on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, shot down by a Russian missile in July 2014, before serious economic sanctions were imposed. Little by little, the West isolated Russia and adjusted its policies. But its indecisiveness invited more aggressive actions from Russia, such as cyberattacks, election meddling, and targeted assassinations of opponents abroad.
In the years after Russia’s intervention, Ukrainians doubled down on their choice to align themselves with the West. In 2018, they enshrined the goals of EU and NATO membership in the Ukrainian constitution—a strategic course that is becoming more popular by the year.
THE FALLACY OF COMPROMISE
Putin has taken notice of these yearnings and, perhaps not surprisingly, is now suggesting that Ukrainian neutrality is key to resolving the crisis. But history gives the lie to this claim. Back in 2014, Ukraine was a neutral country, both on paper and in reality. Four years earlier, it had formally put an end to its ambitions for NATO membership when it passed a law clearly stating that it was a nonaligned country that had no intention of joining any military alliance. There was no nationwide public discussion of NATO membership back then, either; the Euromaidan protests that began in 2013 centered not on the military alliance but on economic and political integration with the EU. If neutrality failed to stop Putin from launching a war in 2014, it is hard to see why it would stop him now.
Another ill-advised idea proposed by some experts is to pressure Ukraine into one-sided concessions, granting compromises that will supposedly make Putin more pacific. Namely, Moscow has long demanded that Kyiv talk directly to Donetsk and Luhansk, the two Russian-occupied regions in the east of Ukraine. Ukraine has rejected this demand, and with good reason: Russia is a party to the conflict, and we are not going to let it present itself as a mediator.
Moreover, history suggests that giving in to this sort of demand is unlikely to satisfy Russia. In 1992, a war intensified in Moldova’s Transnistria region, a post-Soviet conflict that pitted Russian-led forces against the government of Moldova. Even though Russia had fueled the conflict, it demanded that the Moldovan government talk directly to the breakaway region, with Moscow playing the role of mediator. Moldovans agreed and engaged in a direct dialogue with Russia’s proxies in the hope that doing so would resolve the standoff and restore their territorial integrity. In 1994, in another attempt to end the dispute, Moldova officially adopted a neutral policy, declaring that it wouldn’t seek NATO membership. The result of both concessions? A three-decade-long frozen conflict with no thawing in sight. Russian troops and weapons remain in Transnistria to this day.
WHAT DRIVES PUTIN
Putin’s calls for a guarantee concerning NATO expansion present a dilemma. If the West gives in, Russia will no doubt be pleased with its newfound veto over Ukrainian foreign policy and NATO decision-making. If the West rejects its demands, Russia will be equally happy, because it will be able to lay fresh ideological ground for invading Ukraine again.
Since 2014, Russia has legitimized its aggression in Ukraine by referring to a promise the West supposedly made at the end of the Cold War and then broke. According to this narrative, during negotiations over German reunification in 1990, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker pledged to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would never expand eastward. This account is a fairy tale, as even Gorbachev has admitted. But more problematic for Putin, it has become stale, which explains his interest in a new story line. By having his current proposal for guarantees about NATO rejected, Putin hopes to spin a much fresher ideological myth.
The fact that Putin is searching for a new ideological justification concerning Ukraine suggests that he really is on the verge of something big: an attempt to fundamentally rewrite the post–Cold War security order in Europe. Having created a crisis, he hopes to invite U.S. President Joe Biden to the negotiating table to solve it. There, he imagines, the two leaders will draw new lines across Europe, partitioning the continent into new spheres of influence. Moscow has fantasized over such a scenario for years.
WHAT UKRAINE NEEDS
Russia is a master of selling lies, and its illegitimate demands for guarantees and one-sided concessions are just that. But we don’t have to buy what we’re being sold—or even acknowledge the offer. The West shouldn’t appease Russia by agreeing to negotiate over NATO, nor should it give Russia the satisfaction of rejecting its ultimatums. Rather, the West should simply ignore them, continuing to hold further rounds of talks while refusing to bow to Putin’s ultimatums on Ukraine and NATO.
Meanwhile, the United States and its European allies should strengthen their efforts to deter Russia. Unlike appeasement, deterrence has a successful track record. In the spring of 2021, for example, Russia began its massive buildup along the Ukrainian border and spouted belligerent rhetoric threatening to destroy Ukraine. Ukraine’s partners signaled staunch support for Ukraine in public and behind closed doors, and Moscow was forced to ease tensions.
Putin is attempting to fundamentally rewrite the post–Cold War order in Europe.
The only effective way forward is the comprehensive deterrence plan that Ukraine and its partners are currently crafting. The first component is to send clear political signals to Moscow. That means making it plain that Ukraine is part of the West and a future member of the EU and NATO and that Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity are non-negotiable. The second part of the plan involves consequences: in the worst-case scenario of an invasion, the West will enact severe sanctions. Crafting these devastating measures now could spare the West the need to apply them later.
The third and final part of the plan is to deepen military assistance to Ukraine. We have our own capable military forces in Ukraine, and we don’t expect Western countries to put boots on the ground. We do, however, need more weapons to be able to defend ourselves. Everything counts, from ammunition to medical equipment, but we are in particular need of air and missile defenses.
CHOOSING STRENGTH
Ukraine’s goal is simple: peace through strength. For now, the United States and its European allies should talk to Putin to win time while strengthening Ukraine to the extent that Russia will simply have no feasible military option for invading it. At that point, it will be possible to reach a just peace settlement for the Donbas and to finally bring Ukraine into the EU and NATO.
Both goals may seem distant now, but in the long term, the Ukrainian people will have it no other way. We will not abandon this course, no matter how much pressure we face from Russia—or from our U.S. or European partners. When I hear some Western commentators saying that NATO’s proximity is a sensitive issue for Putin, I have only one question to ask: Are the lives and future of 44 million Ukrainians not sensitive, too?
- DMYTRO KULEBA is Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine.
13. Has Washington’s Policy Toward Taiwan Crossed the Rubicon?
Insightful analysis from Paul Heer.
Excerpts:
A key question today is whether Washington is now drifting toward a “one China, one Taiwan” policy. In addition to characterizing Taiwan as an “anchor” for U.S. security in the Indo-Pacific, Ratner described it as a “successful and prosperous democracy.” Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink, who appeared with Ratner at the Senate hearing, described it as “an important U.S. partner” and “a leading democracy, a technological powerhouse, and a force for good.”
But what is Taiwan, in U.S. policy, with regard to “one China?” Ratner, Kritenbrink, and other Biden administration officials all routinely talk about Taiwan as distinct from China, particularly when they include it in the community of democracies that are arrayed in strategic competition against autocracy, as exemplified by China. If Taiwan is not part of China, or part of the “one China” (in “our one-China policy”), and indeed is part of an international struggle against the People’s Republic of China, how is that not a de facto “one China, one Taiwan” policy?
Has Washington’s Policy Toward Taiwan Crossed the Rubicon?
Testimony from officials in the State Department and Defense Department this week included subtle but important shifts in the U.S. policy toward Taiwan.
U.S. policy has been moving slowly but inexorably in this direction for years, through incremental upgrades in the U.S. relationship with Taiwan and incremental reinterpretations of Washington’s “one China” commitments to Beijing. These commitments made possible the establishment of U.S.-China diplomatic relations in 1979. All of this has been routinely explained as “consistent with our one-China policy.” But the substance of that policy has become increasingly indistinct and elusive as time has passed. And Ratner provided a seemingly new rationale for it: After outlining Taiwan’s critical importance, he said it was “for these strategic reasons that this Administration, like those before it, has affirmed our commitment to our one-China policy, as guided by the Taiwan Relations Act, the three Joint U.S.-PRC Communiques, and the Six Assurances.” When did Taiwan’s strategic importance become the foundation for “our one-China policy?” It was the mainland’s strategic importance that prompted the shift in U.S. diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing.
Moreover, the Biden administration has appeared to adopt a rhetorical shift in its citation of the founding documents of “our one-China policy,” routinely highlighting and quoting the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) of 1979, while downplaying or sometimes not even mentioning the Three Communiques. Unlike the TRA, the Three Communiques actually reflect bilateral understandings with Beijing. Apparently, it is necessary to recall briefly what these documents actually say.
The TRA, as we are now frequently reminded, affirms that the United States would “consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means ... a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific and of grave concern to the United States.” Accordingly, Washington must “maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan.” However, it is important to note that this has never constituted a U.S. commitment to defend Taiwan. The TRA was originally an adjunct to “our one-China policy,” not its foundation.
The Three Communiques, on the other hand, explicitly address “one China.” In both the Shanghai Communique of 1972 (on the occasion of President Nixon’s famous trip) and the normalization communique of 1979, the United States said it “acknowledges ... the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China.” Although American acknowledgment did not constitute concurrence, it must be noted that the Shanghai Communique added that “The United States does not challenge that position.” Moreover, and no less important, in the third (“arms sales”) communique of 1982, Washington affirmed that “it has no intention of infringing on Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity, or interfering in China’s internal affairs, or pursuing a policy of ‘two Chinas’ or ‘one China, one Taiwan.’”
A key question today is whether Washington is now drifting toward a “one China, one Taiwan” policy. In addition to characterizing Taiwan as an “anchor” for U.S. security in the Indo-Pacific, Ratner described it as a “successful and prosperous democracy.” Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink, who appeared with Ratner at the Senate hearing, described it as “an important U.S. partner” and “a leading democracy, a technological powerhouse, and a force for good.”
But what is Taiwan, in U.S. policy, with regard to “one China?” Ratner, Kritenbrink, and other Biden administration officials all routinely talk about Taiwan as distinct from China, particularly when they include it in the community of democracies that are arrayed in strategic competition against autocracy, as exemplified by China. If Taiwan is not part of China, or part of the “one China” (in “our one-China policy”), and indeed is part of an international struggle against the People’s Republic of China, how is that not a de facto “one China, one Taiwan” policy?
Washington has asserted (since 1950) that Taiwan’s international legal status remains “undetermined,” and routinely—or at least occasionally—affirms that the United States “does not support Taiwan independence.” But formal independence for Taiwan is not the core issue, especially since Taiwan itself routinely asserts that it is already a sovereign, independent country and thus has no reason to take further steps to formalize it. The core issue is whether Taiwan can achieve permanent separation from the mainland. The significance of Ratner’s statement is that it provides the logic for U.S. support for Taiwan’s permanent separation. Indeed, it argues that this is a strategic imperative for the United States.
Intentionally or otherwise, both Ratner and Kritenbrink obscure this behind their wholly appropriate reaffirmation of Washington’s opposition to forced unification of Taiwan with the mainland. Ratner observed that “leaders in Beijing have never renounced the use of military aggression.” Kritenbrink said “We have publicly and privately urged the PRC to abide by its commitment to peacefully resolve cross-Strait issues.” But no country voluntarily renounces the use of force in defense of its sovereignty claims, and Beijing never made a commitment to peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue. The latter is a myth based on a selective misinterpretation of U.S.-China exchanges dating from the Three Communiques. Beijing never promised anything more than to “strive for a peaceful solution to the Taiwan question,” and Washington said explicitly (in the 1982 communique) that it “understands and appreciates the Chinese policy of striving for a peaceful resolution.” However, on that occasion, President Reagan issued an internal memo noting that the “the U.S. willingness to reduce its arms sales to Taiwan is conditioned absolutely upon the continued commitment of China to the peaceful solution of the Taiwan-PRC differences. It should be clearly understood that the linkage between these two matters is a permanent imperative of U.S. foreign policy.” But that was not Beijing’s understanding or its commitment; and thus Reagan’s memo was a unilateral American interpretation.
In any event, the statements by Ratner and Kritenbrink essentially make the case that Washington is opposed to even peaceful unification of Taiwan with the mainland, because the island’s autonomy from Chinese control is critical to vital U.S. interests and regional security. In that regard, Ratner took a major step into the debate over whether Washington should abandon “strategic ambiguity” in favor of “strategic clarity”—publicly affirming a commitment to defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack. In an exchange with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez, Ratner said it was his “personal view” that “a change in U.S. declaratory policy would not meaningfully strengthen deterrence” against Beijing. But in his formal statement, Ratner nonetheless seemed to approach that line. He later said the Pentagon “remains committed to maintaining the capacity of the United States (invoking the TRA) to resist the resort to force or other forms of coercion that may jeopardize the security of the people of Taiwan. Let me be clear that this is an absolute priority: The PRC is the Department’s pacing challenge and a Taiwan contingency is the pacing scenario. We are modernizing our capabilities, updating U.S. force posture, and developing new operational concepts accordingly.” That may not have been “a change in US declaratory policy,” but it certainly sounded like a determination to defend Taiwan if it is attacked.
Beijing has long assumed that Washington would come to Taiwan’s defense, so Ratner is probably correct that a public U.S. commitment to do so would not strengthen deterrence. On the contrary, Ratner’s statement is likely to reinforce Beijing’s determination to resolve the Taiwan issue by any means necessary, as well as its belief that Washington is opposed to unification in any form.
This new situation requires two things of Washington. The first, as a matter of urgency, must be an effort to supplement deterrence of China with some form of reassurance to Beijing that “our one-China policy” still has substance, and does not include support for Taiwan’s permanent separation from the mainland. This, of course, depends on whether that is actually correct, Washington is ready to offer such an assurance, and Beijing is ready to believe it. The second requirement, less urgent but no less important, is for Washington to contemplate whether there is any conceivable form of reunification between Taiwan and the mainland that would not be deemed inimical to U.S. vital interests and security.
Paul Heer is a Distinguished Fellow at the Center for the National Interest and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He served as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia from 2007 to 2015. He is the author of Mr. X and the Pacific: George F. Kennan and American Policy in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2018).
Image: Reuters.
14. White House is a ‘hurdle’ to Marine vet son Austin Tice’s release from Syria, mother says
White House is a ‘hurdle’ to Marine vet son Austin Tice’s release from Syria, mother says
The mother of abducted journalist Austin Tice said Thursday that the White House has become a “hurdle” to freeing her son from captivity, suggesting that his release was not a priority for the highest levels of the Biden administration.
Debra Tice said she was particularly disappointed with President Joe Biden, who has thus far been unwilling to meet to discuss her son who was abducted in Syria more than nine years ago.
“We have not been able to get a meeting with him,” Debra Tice said at a news conference. “He has never said Austin’s name publicly. And I wonder if he’s allowed himself to forget about Austin. I don’t have any indication otherwise.”
Debra Tice said she has been in Washington for the last five weeks, meeting with government officials and urging them to work toward a release of her son, who was abducted in 2012 while reporting in Syria.
But those conversations mean little unless top White House officials take action, she said.
“The things we’re discussing have to go up the chain,” Tice said. “Otherwise, we really are just having tea and crumpets.”
A senior administration official declined to reveal any details about meetings between Debra Tice and White House officials but emphasized they remain in “regular contact” with the families of those held captive while pursuing their release.
Tice said she hopes to meet personally with national security adviser Jake Sullivan later this week and she remains hopeful that progress is being made toward his release.
“Doors are opening a bit,” Tice said. “And we need to shove those doors open and pull Austin out, right now. It’s critical.”
Biden administration officials have said that they have the “sincere belief” that Tice is alive, and in August, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Syrian President Bashar Assad has the ability to free the Texas native.
Tice, a former officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, was detained at a checkpoint in a suburb of Damascus. He traveled to Syria in 2012 as a freelance journalist for McClatchy and other news organizations.
___
© 2021 McClatchy Washington Bureau
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
15. India and Russia sign arms, trade deals straining tense relationship with US
QUAD?
India and Russia sign arms, trade deals straining tense relationship with US
India and Russia have concluded 28 different deals, including one for the manufacture of 600,000 Russian assault rifles for the Indian Army. New Delhi also signed an agreement on how to respond to cyberattacks on banks.
RFI · by Murali Krishnan in New Delhi · December 11, 2021
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The accords were made on the margins of a summit between India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin during the week and aim to bolster military and trade ties as the countries' leaders met for the first in-person talks since 2019.
Both countries also held their first 2+2 ministerial talks involving defence and foreign ministers, and held a strategic dialogue to discuss reinforcing ties.
Putin’s whirlwind six-hour visit to India happened in the midst of increasingly tense relations between Russia and the United States, also a key Indian ally, which has expressed reservations about the growing military cooperation between Moscow and New Delhi.
#HTEditorial | India’s policy of strategic autonomy in defence procurements and national security interests has served it well, though a more broad-based relationship that expands beyond defence will be essential for ties with Russia in the long-term.https://t.co/PCKKYFRgNy
— Hindustan Times (@htTweets) December 7, 2021
Deliveries in progress
India’s foreign secretary Harsh Shringla said during the week that Russia has already started delivering its long-range S-400 surface-to-air missile defense systems to India on the back of a deal the two countries signed in 2018.
That arms deal, worth US$5 billion, has been a major annoyance in India-US ties with the latter threatening sanctions under the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), which is aimed at reining in Russia.
India's foreign secretary Harsh Shringla said: “S-400 is a legacy contract going back to 2018. Supplies have begun and will continue to happen. We follow an independent foreign policy and decisions are not taken in light of others.”
Addressing the controversy around that deal, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, said in his press briefing after the conclusion of the 2+2 dialogue: “S-400 does not just have symbolic meaning. It has important practical meaning for Indian defence capability. The situation is basically underway. The deal is being implemented.”
Strengthening defence pact
A joint statement published after the talks said Russia and India had "reiterated their intention to strengthen defence cooperation, including in the joint development of production of military equipment."
“Both sides are looking forward to the continued increase in the trade and investment trajectory," said Shringla.
Despite the growing proximity, differences persisted in areas like the concept of Indo-Pacific. Lavrov told reporters that under the aegis of the Indo-Pacific, the US and others were creating exclusive blocs including the trilateral Australia-UK-US pact announced in September.
After S400, Modi and Putin likely to hold talks on S500 and S550 missile systems during Vladimir Putin's India visit.
— NewsBox India™️ (@Newsbox_India) December 6, 2021
“Putin’s visit to an extent arrested the drift in the relationship between the two nations,” said Harsh Pant, head of the strategic studies program at New Delhi-based think tank Observer Research Foundation.
“I think this visit seems to be a recognition from the top of the two countries that despite the divergences, they do see great value in keeping each other a priority country.”
The two countries have a target of $30 billion in trade and $50 billion in investment by 2025.
India confirmed that issues such as Chinese incursions in Ladakh and the situation in Ukraine did come up during the conversations between India and Russia.
The evolving situation in Afghanistan was also discussed, especially the security situation and its implications for the region, relating to terrorism, radicalisation and drug trafficking.
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RFI · by Murali Krishnan in New Delhi · December 11, 2021
16. The Secret History of the U.S. Diplomatic Failure in Afghanistan
Another long but fascinating read.
These three words probably sum up mostall of US strategic failures (well beyond Afghanistan).
misjudgment, hubris, and delusion
(This is the first story in a two-part series.)
The Secret History of the U.S. Diplomatic Failure in Afghanistan
A trove of unreleased documents reveals a dispiriting record of misjudgment, hubris, and delusion that led to the fall of the Western-backed government.
By Steve Coll and Adam Entous
December 10, 2021
On April 14th, President Joe Biden ended the longest war in United States history, announcing that the last remaining American troops in Afghanistan would leave by September 11th. In the following weeks, the Taliban conquered dozens of rural districts and closed in on major cities. By mid-June, the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan—the brittle democratic state built by Afghan modernizers, NATO soldiers, and American taxpayers after the 9/11 attacks—appeared to be in a death spiral. Yet its President, Ashraf Ghani, insisted to his cabinet that the Republic would endure. In every meeting, “he assured us, and encouraged us,” Rangina Hamidi, the acting minister of education, said. Ghani reminded them, “America didn’t make a promise that they would be here forever.”
On June 23rd, Ghani and his advisers boarded a chartered Kam Air jet that would take them from Kabul to Washington, D.C., to meet with Biden. As the plane flew above the Atlantic, they sat on the cabin floor reviewing talking points for the meeting. The Afghan officials knew that Biden regarded their government as hopelessly fractious and ineffective. Still, Ghani recommended that they present “one message to the Americans” of resilient unity, which might persuade the U.S. to give them more support in their ongoing war with the Taliban. Amrullah Saleh, the First Vice-President, who said that he felt “backstabbed” by Biden’s decision to withdraw, reluctantly agreed to “stick to a rosy narrative.”
Biden welcomed Ghani and his top aides to the Oval Office on the afternoon of June 25th. “We’re not walking away,” Biden told Ghani. He pulled from his shirt pocket a schedule card on which he’d written the number of American lives lost in Afghanistan and Iraq since 9/11, and showed it to Ghani. “I appreciate the American sacrifices,” Ghani said. Then he explained, “Our goal for the next six months is to stabilize the situation,” and described the circumstances in Afghanistan as a “Lincoln moment.”
“The most important ask I have for Afghanistan is that we have a friend in the White House,” Ghani said.
“You have a friend,” Biden replied.
Ghani asked for specific military assistance. Could the U.S. provide more helicopters? Would American contractors continue to offer logistical support to the Afghan military? Biden’s answers were vague, according to Afghan officials in the room.
Biden and Ghani also discussed the possibility of a peace agreement between the Islamic Republic and the Taliban. American diplomats had been talking with the Taliban for years, to negotiate a U.S. withdrawal and to foster separate peace talks between the insurgents and Kabul. But the talks had fallen apart, and the Taliban seemed determined to seize Afghanistan by force. The likelihood of the Taliban “doing anything rational is not very high,” Biden said, according to the Afghan officials present.
While Ghani and his aides met with Biden, Shaharzad Akbar, the chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, conferred in Washington with Americans working in human rights, democracy, and development. She recalled being stunned to hear that many of the Americans had already “concluded that Afghanistan was a lost cause, and had sort of made peace with themselves.” They asked her what contingency plans she was making to flee Kabul and go into exile. After the official visit, she stayed in the U.S. through July 4th, and listened to Biden’s speech marking the holiday, in which he said, “We’re about to see our brightest future.”
“I ended up crying a lot that evening,” Akbar said. She returned to Kabul and went from embassy to embassy requesting visas for her staff.
On May 10, 1968, in Paris, the United States opened peace talks with North Vietnam. President Richard Nixon, who regarded the negotiations mainly as political cover for America’s withdrawal from the war, knew that the terms under discussion would leave South Vietnam, America’s ally, vulnerable. In October, 1972, Nixon asked Henry Kissinger, his national-security adviser, about the likelihood of South Vietnam’s survival. “I think there is one chance in four,” Kissinger told him.
“Well, if they’re that collapsible, maybe they just have to be collapsed,” Nixon said. In January, 1973, the United States signed a pact called the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam and withdrew all its combat forces. Two years later, North Vietnam and Vietcong guerrillas conquered South Vietnam. Helicopters evacuated the last American personnel from the rooftop of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.
The Islamic Republic’s last chapter followed a strikingly similar course. For years, peace talks were stalled by the Taliban’s refusal to speak with the Afghan government. But in 2018 President Donald Trump, determined to end the war with or without the Afghan President’s involvement, appointed a special envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, to negotiate directly with the Taliban, which had representatives in Doha. Khalilzad was a sixty-seven-year-old Afghan-born diplomat, who had earned a doctorate in political science at the University of Chicago and had served in several Republican Administrations. From 2003 to 2005, he was George W. Bush’s Ambassador to Afghanistan. His instructions were clear: make a deal with the Taliban that would allow for a quick American military withdrawal.
In February, 2020, the U.S. and the Taliban signed an accord called the Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan: the U.S. pledged to pull out all its combat troops by May of 2021 if the Taliban repudiated Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, entered into good-faith talks with the Islamic Republic, and sought to reduce violence in the country. The Taliban also promised not to attack U.S. and NATO troops who were preparing to leave. They could continue to attack Afghan forces, however. Many of the provisions were not made public, and the Islamic Republic was not a party to the agreement.
By then, the alliance between Washington and Kabul—once bathed in the aspirational language of democracy, women’s rights, and nation-building—had become embittered by recriminations and mutual exhaustion. The peace accord between the U.S. and the Taliban made things dramatically worse. It contained a series of secret written and verbal agreements, including a contentious provision barring the U.S. from helping Afghan troops in their offensive operations against the Taliban. Ghani, who was largely cut out of the process, struggled to understand what the United States had agreed to and why, and, even when he did understand, he objected vigorously. Later, when the Taliban failed to deliver on commitments that it had made to the U.S., the Trump Administration ignored the violations. “Ghani felt lied to,” Hamdullah Mohib, his national-security adviser, said. “He was undermined.”
Throughout the negotiations, Ghani maintained back channels to American politicians who were supportive of the war, such as the Republican senator Lindsey Graham, who had long called for America’s continued presence in Afghanistan. After Ghani’s talks with Graham, the senator would regularly call Mike Pompeo, Trump’s Secretary of State, who at one point accused Ghani of “mobilizing Washington against” the Trump Administration. The view of many State Department officials, including nonpartisan career diplomats, was that Ghani had little interest in negotiating with the Taliban. “He preferred the status quo,” Khalilzad said. “It kept him in power.”
In January, Biden inherited this fragmenting compact. He could prolong America’s military deployment, regardless of the deal, or he could continue down the exit ramp that Trump had built. Biden, who as Vice-President under Barack Obama had opposed sending large numbers of troops to fight in the war, was openly doubtful that Afghanistan could ever become a secure and governable nation. At times, he seemed as cold-blooded about the Islamic Republic as Nixon had been about South Vietnam. His decision to abruptly withdraw the remaining U.S. forces in Afghanistan, culminating in the Taliban’s rapid takeover of the country—and the chaotic evacuation of more than a hundred thousand people from Hamid Karzai International Airport—is an indelible part of his record. For Afghanistan’s population of about thirty-eight million, the defeat has been incomparably more consequential. The Taliban are reimposing strict Sharia law on the country, which has lost billions of dollars in foreign aid, and the nation is now gripped by a spreading famine.
The debates and decisions in Washington, Kabul, and Doha that preceded the Islamic Republic’s fall took place largely in private. Hundreds of pages of meeting notes, transcripts, memoranda, e-mails, and documents, as well as extensive interviews with Afghan and American officials, present a dispiriting record of misjudgment, hubris, and delusion from the very start.
The first serious attempt to negotiate with the Taliban began in November, 2010. Nine years earlier, the U.S. had overthrown the Taliban’s government, which had harbored the Al Qaeda terrorists who were responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The Taliban had mounted an insurgency to try to return to power, and Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s envoy to the region, hoped to persuade them to stop fighting and to enter Afghan politics. American diplomats and Taliban negotiators engaged in talks about a possible peace settlement. But the Taliban refused to work with the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai—the country’s first-ever democratically elected head of state—seeing him as an illegitimate puppet. Karzai, in turn, objected to America’s conferring legitimacy on extremist rebels bent on overthrowing his government.
“You betrayed me!” Karzai shouted at Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, during a meeting in late 2011. Obama ultimately deferred to Karzai, and by mid-2013 serious discussions with the Taliban about power sharing had ended. Before Obama left office, he drastically reduced the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan from its peak of about a hundred thousand. But he left eighty-four hundred American soldiers on a mission of indefinite duration, to strike Al Qaeda and a branch of the Islamic State, and to aid Afghan forces fighting the Taliban.
In 2017, President Trump appointed General H. R. McMaster as national-security adviser. McMaster recommended more U.S. airpower and intelligence aid to support Afghan forces, and a tougher approach to Pakistan, the Taliban’s historical protectors. Trump agreed to the strategy, and seemed to accept that peace between the Taliban and the Islamic Republic might not be achievable. “Nobody knows if or when that will ever happen,” he said that August. He promised that U.S. troops would remain in Afghanistan until they had defeated Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. “The consequences of a rapid exit are both predictable and unacceptable,” he said.
But when the strategy failed to quickly turn the war around Trump began looking for a way out. (Later, he complained, “I should have followed my instincts, not my generals!”) The following year, Trump fired McMaster and replaced him with John Bolton, an ardent conservative and Fox News commentator who had served in previous Republican Administrations. He also appointed Mike Pompeo, his C.I.A. director, as Secretary of State. During the summer of 2018, Pompeo consulted with Khalilzad, who, in September, became the Administration’s envoy to negotiate with the Taliban. “It was thought that nobody knows the Afghan situation, the Afghan players” better than Khalilzad, Charles Kupperman, then one of Bolton’s top advisers, said. Also, “there weren’t a lot of other candidates.” A diplomat on Khalilzad’s staff was told that Trump wanted to leave Afghanistan in six months, but that perhaps he could be persuaded to wait as many as nine months.
Khalilzad is a little more than six feet tall and has the quick, expressive smile of an ace salesman. “Zal is extremely likable,” Elliott Abrams, his colleague in the George W. Bush Administration, said. “Great sense of humor. Jokes all the time.” Other officials found him evasive, particularly when he was involved in complex diplomacy. “No shortage of talking, but a lot of difficulty in figuring out exactly what he’s talking about and why,” Crocker said, adding that Khalilzad reminded him of “a Freya Stark version of an Arab proverb: ‘It is good to know the truth and speak it, but it is better to know the truth and speak of palm trees.’ ” According to Bolton, Trump once remarked of Khalilzad, “I hear he’s a con man, although you need a con man for this.” Khalilzad brushed off such insults, citing an adage often attributed to Harry S. Truman: “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”
In October, 2018, Khalilzad flew to Kabul, where he met Ghani at the Arg palace, an eighty-three-acre compound housing the Afghan President’s offices and residence. They had known each other for nearly fifty years. As teen-agers in Kabul during the late nineteen-sixties, they had joined the American Field Service high-school exchange program. (Ghani went to Lake Oswego, Oregon, and Khalilzad to Ceres, California.) Throughout the years, according to American diplomats who worked with them, their relationship began to resemble a sibling rivalry. When Ghani ran for President in 2014, he bridled at indications that Khalilzad might be exploring his own bid, which Khalilzad denied. In meetings, they bantered in a patois of Dari and English. In private, each seemed convinced that the other suffered from excessive ego and ambition.
Ghani was once a planner at the World Bank and a naturalized American. After the Taliban fell, he returned to Afghanistan, where he served as Hamid Karzai’s finance minister. He left government in 2004, and five years later, after giving up his American citizenship, he ran for President against Karzai and lost. When Karzai was ineligible for another term, in 2014, Ghani ran again, and he narrowly beat Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister, in an election marred by allegations of fraud. After negotiations, Abdullah became Afghanistan’s Chief Executive.
Ghani earned a doctorate in anthropology at Columbia, and he sometimes seemed to approach his Presidency as if it were graduate school. Between his two residences in Kabul, he cumulatively maintained a personal library of about seven thousand books, and during meetings he often referenced academic literature. He sought to empower those whom he referred to as Afghanistan’s “stakeholders”—human-rights activists, Islamic scholars, media companies, and businesses. He populated his wartime administration with other technocrats who had graduate degrees from universities abroad, and spurned traditional Afghan politicians and strongmen, who he thought had brought the country to ruin. American diplomats and military commanders continually pressed Ghani to align with Karzai, Abdullah, and figures such as Abdul Rashid Dostum, who had an armed following and a record of alleged human-rights abuses. Much of the strength of the military opposition to the Taliban resided with such individuals, and it was hard to see how Ghani could strike a deal without them.
“He’s just not a good politician,” James Cunningham, who served as the U.S. Ambassador in Kabul during Ghani’s first term, said. “There are lots of things I do admire about him, but he wasn’t able to find the political skills necessary to build coalitions and partnerships with people who disagreed with him.”
During his initial meeting with Khalilzad at the Arg palace, Ghani delivered a long PowerPoint presentation about the obstacles to peace. He envisioned that the Islamic Republic and the United States would negotiate together, sitting across from the Taliban, an idea that Khalilzad found plainly unrealistic. For nearly a decade, the Taliban had insisted that they wanted to talk only to the U.S., to secure the withdrawal of NATO troops, which they regarded as an occupying force. Khalilzad and many other diplomats believed that peace negotiations between Ghani’s government and the Taliban would have to come after the U.S. had agreed to leave and the Taliban had pledged, in return, to engage in such talks.
After the meeting, Khalilzad flew to Pakistan, where he met with guerrilla leaders. When Ghani heard about the meeting, after it was over, he exploded. He was known for having a temper. “He would become emotional and start shouting,” Yasin Zia, a four-star Afghan general who was appointed chief of Army staff in 2020, recalled. “In a war, this type of behavior will not help you.” American diplomats sometimes regarded these flareups as manufactured outrage, designed to slow down any negotiations that might undermine Ghani’s authority.
The mutual distrust between Khalilzad and Ghani shaped—and distorted—U.S.-Afghan relations for the next three years.
The United States and the Taliban opened formal negotiations on January 22, 2019. The participants met in downtown Doha, in a cylindrical glass tower that houses Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Khalilzad led the American delegation; Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, a diplomat who briefly participated in talks with Obama Administration negotiators, in 2011, helped lead the Taliban team. “War has gone on too long,” Stanikzai said, in an opening statement. “We have shed millions of gallons of blood. We want peace in Afghanistan through negotiations.” Abdullah Amini, a veteran adviser to U.S. military commanders in Kabul, who had lost many relatives during the long conflict, audibly wept as he translated Stanikzai’s remarks for the American delegation.
Khalilzad had conceived an accord that consisted of four parts: the U.S. would withdraw from Afghanistan; the Taliban would guarantee that Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other terrorist groups would not operate against the U.S.; the Taliban and the Islamic Republic would negotiate a power-sharing agreement; and there would be a ceasefire. The four parts were interdependent—or as Khalilzad often put it, “Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.”
At first, both sides were deferential. “We can withdraw half by the end of April,” Khalilzad said, referring to U.S. forces. Stanikzai was just as quick to offer assurances about counterterrorism: “We will guarantee that we will not allow Al Qaeda to attack you.” But when Khalilzad proposed a nationwide ceasefire and power-sharing negotiations between the Taliban and Kabul, Stanikzai balked. “We understand that we cannot rule Afghanistan alone and we need help in reaching a negotiated settlement,” he said. But he first wanted a deal ratifying a U.S. troop departure in exchange for the Taliban’s counterterrorism promises.
They went back and forth for days. “Washington insists on a comprehensive ceasefire,” Khalilzad said, in the final session. Eventually, the Taliban envoys said that if the U.S. pledged to withdraw they would stop attacking U.S. and allied NATO forces, but that the Taliban’s war to overthrow Ghani’s government would continue. The Taliban would consider a ceasefire with Kabul only as an agenda item in future talks among the Afghan parties.
This was far from what American negotiators had wanted. U.S. forces were in Afghanistan partly to defend the Islamic Republic from its armed enemies; their mission’s name was Resolute Support. American commanders believed that it would be both dangerous and dishonorable to leave the war without a political settlement among the Afghans and a durable ceasefire. But Khalilzad was worried that a hard-line approach would stall the talks and encourage Trump to abandon the Islamic Republic even more abruptly. He suggested that they return to the dispute later.
Toward the end of February, Khalilzad arrived in Doha, at the Sharq Village and Spa, a whitewashed Ritz-Carlton hotel on the Persian Gulf. Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a founder of the Taliban, met him for lunch. Baradar had been the deputy defense minister in the Taliban government before it fell. After Hamid Karzai was elected President, Baradar, who had gone into hiding, engaged in back-channel talks about political reconciliation between the Taliban and the new Islamic Republic, according to Afghan and American officials. In 2010, a joint C.I.A.-Pakistani team arrested Baradar in Karachi, and Pakistan imprisoned him, later transferring him to house arrest. After Khalilzad became Trump’s envoy, he persuaded Qamar Javed Bajwa, Pakistan’s Army chief, to release Baradar as a gesture of good will.
“I’ve studied you,” Khalilzad told Baradar, according to Lisa Curtis, an Afghanistan specialist on Trump’s national-security staff, who was present at the meeting. “I know you’re a man of peace.”
“I realize that I would not be sitting at this table if it weren’t for you,” Baradar replied.
Khalilzad and Pompeo saw Baradar’s role in Doha as a sign that the Taliban were serious about the talks. (As Pompeo once told Ghani, Baradar is “a very sophisticated player.”) The day after their lunch, Khalilzad joined Baradar in his hotel room, which overlooked a swimming pool where women were lounging in bikinis. “You must feel like you’re in Heaven,” Khalilzad joked, invoking the commonly held Islamic belief that the afterlife offers a paradise of water and virgins. Baradar walked to the window and pulled the curtain shut.
Negotiations between the Americans and the Taliban continued through the spring, first at the Sharq and later at Doha’s Diplomatic Club. Baradar did not attend regularly, but Khalilzad occasionally visited him privately in his hotel room. Khalilzad also maintained separate WhatsApp threads with members of the Taliban delegation and a few of Ghani’s aides, and occasionally messaged Ghani using Signal. His rapid diplomatic maneuvering made it hard for other officials at the Pentagon and the White House to follow what he was doing. One Pentagon official said that members of the negotiating team used to joke that “the most interesting exploitable piece of hardware in the world is Zal’s cell phone,” because he was constantly having discussions that no one else was privy to. “He called it improvisational,” the official said. “To the rest of us, it seemed more like chaos.” On April 19th, Ghani sent a letter to Pompeo complaining that he was being cut out of Khalilzad’s talks with the Taliban, and that Khalilzad had spoken to him for a total of only six minutes during a sixteen-day stretch of negotiations.
The official sessions were attended by Stanikzai and other Taliban negotiators, including former Guantánamo detainees released around the time of the Obama-era negotiations. Morning meetings were scheduled to begin at ten-thirty; the Americans arrived early, and the Taliban usually drifted in late. By the beginning of the summer, however, the two sides were exchanging drafts of a final agreement. Khalilzad set July 14th as the date to announce the signing, and he began planning for immediate follow-up negotiations, in Oslo, between the Taliban and representatives of the Islamic Republic, to decide Afghanistan’s political future.
The Americans still hadn’t determined whether the Taliban would accept a ceasefire in its war against the Islamic Republic. In early July, Molly Phee, Khalilzad’s deputy, pressed Stanikzai on this topic, which she described as an issue “of extreme importance” to the “most senior American leadership.” Stanikzai would not budge, and he introduced a new demand: he wanted thousands of Taliban prisoners held by Ghani’s government released.
The Taliban envoys insisted that they needed the concession to convince their most hard-line factions of the benefits of peace talks. Khalilzad said that the U.S. would try to persuade Ghani to agree to this, and when U.S. military officers in the room realized that the Taliban might get their prisoners without the Americans getting a ceasefire, they wanted to walk out, Andru Wall, a Navy commander at Resolute Support, recalled. Khalilzad “plainly wanted a deal and seemed willing to give the Taliban almost everything,” Wall said. “It was not clear if we had any true red lines.” On July 3rd, the draft agreement was updated to include the release of “up to” five thousand Taliban prisoners. (In return, the Taliban would release a thousand Afghan government detainees.)
A week later, General Austin S. Miller, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, flew into Doha, and Khalilzad met him for breakfast. They were joined by Nader Nadery and Abdul Matin Bek, two young advisers to Ghani, who had spoken with Taliban envoys. Nadery and Bek reported that several Taliban had boasted contemptuously about defeating America. “They’re running with their tails between their legs,” one of the Taliban negotiators had exclaimed. Bek later told Khalilzad to “wake up.” “Please, for God’s sake, the Taliban are not in favor of negotiations, they are not in favor of a political settlement,” he said. “They’re really on a victory march.”
Khalilzad told him not to worry. “I’ve cornered them,” he said. “There will be a political settlement.” (Khalilzad denied that this exchange took place.)
There was nothing to announce on July 14th. On August 7th, at the Diplomatic Club, the negotiating teams discussed two secret “annexes” to the main draft agreement, to resolve the remaining disputes. One would detail the Taliban’s commitments to suppressing Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The other would attempt to link a U.S. withdrawal to a reduction in the war’s violence. Recognizing that the Taliban would not end its military campaign against the Islamic Republic, Khalilzad proposed that all sides temporarily halt fighting in five of the country’s thirty-four provinces so that the U.S. could safely begin its withdrawal. In the rest of Afghanistan, the war would continue, and, if the Taliban attacked Afghan units, American forces could intervene. If the Taliban stopped attacking Afghan units in any area, the U.S. would reciprocate, and there would be a local ceasefire. But since the U.S. had an “obligation” to defend its Afghan allies, Phee, Khalilzad’s deputy, explained, the scope of this reduction in violence would be determined by the Taliban. “You have the power,” she said. “If you don’t attack,” then “we won’t attack.” She acknowledged that the proposal was complicated. “We’d prefer a ceasefire everywhere,” she said.
The proposal was a prescription for confusion and further conflict. Both sides accepted that the U.S. would no longer engage in “offensive” operations against the Taliban. But the U.S. and the Taliban disagreed about the circumstances in which the U.S. could come to the defense of its allies. The Taliban argued that Miller’s forces could strike only guerrillas who were directly involved in attacks on Afghan forces, whereas Miller considered this interpretation too narrow, and concluded that he was also allowed to act in other ways, including striking preëmptively against Taliban fighters who were planning an attack.
Either way, the U.S. concessions to the Taliban would clearly be a blow to Ghani’s military. For years, Afghan forces had relied on U.S. bombers and artillery to back up their ground attacks, and to strike Taliban encampments and supply lines. Now Afghan troops would be on their own during offensive campaigns, and, if they were attacked, they would face uncertainties about whether or when U.S. forces would go into action.
But Khalilzad believed that he had forged sufficient common ground to close the deal. He shared a draft text with Ghani—although, initially, not the proposed annexes, because he was worried about those sections leaking. Ghani, predictably, objected to the draft, and he marked up the document with changes. Pompeo and Khalilzad ignored most of his edits and arranged to brief Trump on the deal on August 16th, at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey.
Khalilzad joined Trump in a conference room, along with Vice-President Mike Pence, Bolton, and other national-security officials. He described the Taliban’s promise that they would not allow Al Qaeda to attack the U.S. When it was noted that Ghani was unhappy with the deal, Trump said, “Why are you wasting your time going to talk to Ghani? He’s a crook.”
Trump then asked Khalilzad if he could give the Taliban “something to make them coöperate.”
“What are you talking about, Mr. President?”
“Like money.”
“No,” Khalilzad replied. “They’re on a terrorism list. We can’t give them money.”
Trump moved on to other topics before Khalilzad could explain that the Taliban’s war against Kabul was likely to continue.
On August 25th, in Doha, the Taliban accepted final annex drafts on counterterrorism and restrictions on fighting. The language prohibited the Taliban from attacking U.S. and NATO troops as they withdrew. “If one American dies after the deal is signed, then the deal is off,” Miller told the Taliban envoys, according to an official who was present. As for the Taliban’s ongoing war against the Islamic Republic, Miller would take “necessary and proportionate measures” to defend Kabul’s troops when they came under attack, without engaging in “offensive” operations.
The Taliban envoys also offered verbal commitments that the American officials documented for their record. On counterterrorism, the Taliban representatives said that they “welcome continued U.S. operations” against the Islamic State and Al Qaeda. If the U.S. bombed the Islamic State, “we will hang flowers around your neck,” they said; as for Al Qaeda, they told the Americans, “Kill as many as you want.” In a concession to Miller, the Taliban also agreed not to attack major Afghan cities or any diplomatic facilities.
In the end, the terms prioritized a safe American withdrawal. This was at a time when U.S. casualty numbers in Afghanistan had long been on the decline. U.S. and NATO troops seldom participated in on-the-ground fighting; their main jobs were to protect the government, train the Afghan Army, and provide air support. These roles were critical to the war effort, but they were also relatively low-risk. Since 2015, fewer than a dozen American soldiers had died annually in combat in Afghanistan. The yearly death toll suffered by the Islamic Republic’s soldiers and police was estimated at more than eight thousand. According to the United Nations, the war also claimed the lives of several thousand civilians each year.
At the end of August, Trump came up with a plan to invite the Taliban to Camp David to sign the agreement. Then, on September 5th, a car bomb detonated in Kabul, killing about a dozen people, including Elis Angel Barreto Ortiz, a thirty-four-year-old U.S. Army sergeant. That weekend, Trump ended the peace talks with a tweet blaming the deaths on the Taliban: “If they cannot agree to a ceasefire during these very important peace talks, and would even kill 12 innocent people, then they probably don’t have the power to negotiate a meaningful agreement anyway.”
Pompeo told Khalilzad, “You should come home.”
When Trump pulled out of the agreement, “I literally jumped for joy,” a senior White House official recalled. “I was thrilled when that tweet came out.” Many officials throughout the government, including Bolton and other national-security aides, thought that the terms of the deal wildly advantaged the Taliban, and some were opposed to compromising altogether. (“The idea that we could negotiate ourselves with the Taliban, excluding the Afghan government, was lunacy,” Charles Kupperman, who had become Bolton’s deputy, said.) But their victory was short-lived. Two months later, Khalilzad’s team secured the release of two professors from the American University of Afghanistan—an American and an Australian—who had been kidnapped in 2016 and held by the Taliban’s Haqqani faction, a group with ties to Al Qaeda. Earlier, Ghani had freed Anas Haqqani, a young member of the network. In the aftermath of these prisoner releases, Pompeo told Khalilzad to try to re-start peace talks.
On December 7th, Baradar met Khalilzad again in Doha, still seeking an American commitment to promptly leave Afghanistan. “Our main goal is the designation of a date and an announcement” for signing the agreement, Baradar said. They decided to sign the deal negotiated the previous summer. The Taliban promised to reduce violence for seven days before the deal was official, to demonstrate their commitment. Pompeo called Ghani to inform him that an accord was again at hand, and only then did Ghani learn that few of his objections had been taken into account.
On February 29, 2020, at the Sheraton Grand Doha Resort, Khalilzad and Baradar, sitting on a makeshift stage, signed the Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan. The accord stated that on March 10, 2020, “the Taliban will start intra-Afghan negotiations” to seek an enduring peace, and the United States pledged to pull out its combat forces by May of 2021. Ghani, who concluded that he had no choice but to coöperate, issued a “joint declaration” with the Trump Administration, in which he endorsed the deal’s general goals while making it clear that he disagreed with the terms. At the ceremony in Doha, Pompeo told attendees that the agreement “will mean nothing” unless all its parties “take concrete action on commitments and promises that have been made.” Haibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban’s reclusive supreme leader, issued a statement from an unknown location, calling the American commitment to withdraw “the collective victory of the entire Muslim and Mujahid nation.”
The next day, Trump called Ghani. “We’re relying on you to get this done,” he said, meaning a power-sharing deal with the Taliban. The accord was “popular among the American people,” Trump went on. “It’s popular among my enemies as well.” Ghani replied that the key would be “verifiable action” by the Taliban to reduce their violence, but he said that he was prepared to send a team to negotiate with them.
“Great step,” Trump said. “We need to get this done. Call me if you need anything.”
Two days later, Trump called Baradar. According to an official who listened to the exchange, Trump told him, “You guys are tough fighters.” Then Trump asked, “Do you need something from me?”
“We need to get prisoners released,” Baradar said, adding that he had heard Ghani would not coöperate. Trump said that he would tell Pompeo to press Ghani.
Later that month, Pompeo met with Ghani in Kabul and urged him to be flexible about releasing the Taliban’s prisoners. But he also gave him an assurance: “The United States is your leverage. If we do not get what we want, we will not leave,” he said. “We will only leave when there is a political resolution.”
“This clarity that you will stand with us in the negotiation is something that we have never had,” Ghani told him.
Then Pompeo qualified his earlier statement: “The only thing that will change that is if we have no progress.” Ghani did not appear to absorb this warning. Later, he quoted Pompeo’s comment to a European diplomat, calling it a “turning point”—evidence that the U.S. truly would not abandon the Islamic Republic until there was a negotiated peace.
That spring, the Taliban submitted the names of the five thousand prisoners for whom it was demanding release before power-sharing talks could begin. A group of U.S. intelligence officers and other officials reviewed the Taliban names and produced an “objection list,” which contained several convicted murderers, including Nargis Mohammad Hasan, an Afghan police officer born in Iran who, in 2012, had killed Joseph Griffin, an American police trainer, at the Kabul police headquarters. Also on the list was a prisoner known as Hekmatullah, a former Afghan soldier who had killed three off-duty Australian soldiers while they were playing poker and the board game Risk. Their cases were just two of dozens of “insider attacks”—killings of off-duty soldiers and civilians, typically by Taliban recruits—that had come to shadow the American war.
Ghani’s advisers were developing their own list of several hundred prisoners who they said were problematic—murderers, kidnappers, and drug traffickers, some on death row. In late May, Ghani released just under a thousand prisoners, whom his advisers had identified as low-risk. But the Taliban held firm: release all five thousand or no negotiations. “The Talibs became adamant,” Khalilzad recalled. “They knew that we were so desperate that the intra-Afghan negotiations begin.”
Rather than put more pressure on the Taliban, the Trump Administration continued to focus on getting Ghani to bend. As they wrestled over the prisoner problem, Khalilzad visited Ghani at the Arg palace, carrying a message from Trump: “We are ready to work with President Ghani, but if there is a perception that the big picture is being sacrificed for small matters then we are ready to change our relationship.”
Ghani was unmoved. “The U.S. doesn’t owe us anything,” he told Khalilzad. “If you want to leave, then leave—no hard feelings.”
Ghani clearly preferred a long-term military alliance with Washington, and he spent much of his Presidency pleading with American envoys for more support. But the Afghan President chafed at the expectations placed on him by the U.S. Notionally, he was the sovereign leader of a constitutional democracy. He considered this a matter of high principle, and annoyed diplomats by often falling back on “legalistic and formalistic expressions of Afghan legitimacy,” as a senior State Department official put it. In reality, the state that Ghani led was deeply dependent on American money and military power. “They would give us hints about what they wanted us to do, but if we did not do those things then we would get heavy pressure,” Mohib, Ghani’s national-security adviser, said. Ghani’s suggestions that the Republic would be fine without the U.S. were either shows of bravado or simply wishful thinking.
That July, Trump decided that he would cut U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan by roughly half, to about four thousand. Khalilzad was disappointed: he had expected the Trump Administration to conduct a formal review of the Taliban’s compliance with the Doha deal before withdrawing more troops, but it hadn’t. At that point, Khalilzad’s assessment was that Taliban compliance was mixed. They had refrained from attacking U.S. forces, as promised, and had reduced fedayeen-style assaults and truck bombings in cities and large district capitals. They delivered a three-day ceasefire over Eid al-Fitr in late May that mostly held up well. Yet they continued to attack Afghan forces, costing hundreds of Afghan lives.
Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met with Ghani in Kabul and assured him that the pullout didn’t mean that the U.S. was giving up on Afghanistan. “We have signed up for a conditional drawdown,” he said, using language that had been given to him by Pompeo: U.S. troops would stay until certain conditions had been met, and one of those conditions was that the Taliban and the Islamic Republic engage in negotiations. And yet it was obvious to everyone by now that Trump could overrule his generals at any time.
On July 29th, Khalilzad and Miller, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces, met with Ghani at his residence, with new assurances from Baradar. They conveyed to Ghani that, if he released everyone on the Taliban list, the Taliban would very likely “reduce violence significantly” and start power-sharing talks right away. Ghani recoiled at the proposition. “If the U.S. wants to release people who have death sentences, and the biggest drug traffickers in the world, then you should take responsibility for it,” he said. “I’m not.”
Eventually, Ghani found a compromise that gave the Americans what they wanted. He called a loya jirga, a traditional consultative assembly, to decide the fate of the most problematic Taliban prisoners. In early August, the loya jirga approved the release of everyone on the Taliban’s list, including Hasan and the other prisoners on the “objection list.” (An Afghan intelligence official said that, weeks after Hasan was released, someone from the F.B.I. asked if she could be recaptured, but she had already fled to Iran.)
On September 12th, at the Sharq resort, intra-Afghan talks were formally inaugurated, six months after the Doha accord had specified. The group of twenty-one delegates sent by Kabul had been preparing for months, like athletes training for a big season perpetually delayed, and a German foundation had delivered seminars on how to negotiate for peace. But, at the Sharq, the Kabul team found that the Taliban were exceedingly stubborn. It took more than two months to resolve one agenda item. The Taliban “were feeling a kind of pride that they had defeated the United States,” Habiba Sarabi, one of the delegates, recalled.
At the same time, the guerrillas mounted offensives in Kandahar and Helmand that were clearly “violations in spirit, if not the written word” of the Doha accord, Miller said. During the last three months of 2020, after the prisoner releases, violence spiked across Afghanistan, and civilian casualties rose by forty-five per cent, compared with 2019. The onslaught “exacerbated the environment of fear and paralyzed many parts of society,” the U.N. reported. The Taliban also protested many American strikes carried out in support of Afghan forces, calling them a violation of the Doha accord’s annex on managing combat. Like aggressive corporate litigators seeking to drown their opponents in paper, the guerrillas filed more than sixteen hundred complaints to Khalilzad’s team, and used them to justify their intensifying military campaign against Kabul.
When Joe Biden ran for Senate in 1972, at the age of twenty-nine, he campaigned on his opposition to the Vietnam War. He did not claim that the war was immoral; rather, he believed that it was “merely stupid and a horrendous waste of time, money and lives based on a flawed premise,” as he later wrote in his memoir. Biden has approached the Afghan war with similar skepticism. In 2009, as Vice-President, Biden met Karzai, the Afghan President at the time, who urged him to work harder to end Pakistan’s support for the Taliban. “Mr. President,” Biden replied, according to Karzai and another Afghan present, “Pakistan is fifty times more important to the United States than Afghanistan.” In 2015, Ghani and Abdullah joined Biden for breakfast in Washington, where he told them that the Afghan war was “unwinnable.” According to Mohib, Ghani’s national-security adviser, Afghan officials were left convinced that if Biden were ever President “he will probably want to withdraw.”
After Biden was elected, in November, 2020, he named Jake Sullivan as national-security adviser and Antony Blinken as Secretary of State. Both men had years of experience working in government, and they were well acquainted with the miserable set of policy options in Afghanistan. It was unclear whether Biden would follow Trump’s deal to the letter, abandon it, or make adjustments in response to the Taliban’s violence. During the Presidential transition, Sullivan, Blinken, and other advisers sent Biden a memo reporting that the talks with the Taliban weren’t going anywhere. Khalilzad had apparently failed to get the Taliban and the Islamic Republic to work together, but Biden asked him to stay on as special representative at least through the spring. He knew all the players, and if the Biden Administration wanted to meet the Doha accord’s May 1st deadline for a full U.S. troop withdrawal, it would have to work quickly.
As soon as Biden took office, Mohib sought a meeting at the White House, but was told that only a phone call would be possible. Mohib, who had earned a doctorate in electrical engineering in Britain and had served as Afghanistan’s Ambassador in Washington from 2015 to 2018, had been Ghani’s national-security adviser for three years. Methodical, calm, and hard to read, he was intensely loyal to Ghani, whose ideas inspired him, but he was increasingly seen as the instrument—if not the instigator—of Ghani’s micromanaging.
On January 22nd, Mohib spoke on the phone with Sullivan. The new Administration sought to preserve Afghanistan’s social and economic gains, Sullivan said, including “democracy, rights of women, and rights of minorities.” If the Taliban did not engage in “meaningful and sincere negotiations” in Doha, “they will bear the consequences of their choices.” He added that he did not mean this with “a view to escalate the conflict but to take a hard-nosed look at the situation.”
Sullivan inaugurated an interagency policy review at the National Security Council: briefings and debates that would inform Biden’s decision on Afghanistan. The U.S. troop presence had fallen to twenty-five hundred. Miller, the Resolute Support commander, felt strongly that Biden should keep these troops in place beyond the deadline, pessimistic about what would happen to the Afghan military if U.S. forces left. Much of the discussion came down to whether it made sense to keep trying to forge a deal between the Taliban and the Islamic Republic, and, if so, for how long.
“Sir, we’re not for staying forever,” Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Austin, the Defense Secretary, told Biden during the policy review. But they proposed extending the U.S. troop presence for up to a year, hoping to pressure the Taliban to take power-sharing negotiations more seriously. It was not clear why a short extension of the American deployment might facilitate talks that had repeatedly failed to advance. White House officials regarded the Pentagon’s scenario as just another way of recommending that the troops stay indefinitely. If the Taliban attacked NATO, Biden might have to commit more troops or order a withdrawal under pressure. The Pentagon proposals were set aside, and the discussion shifted to what would happen if the U.S. pulled out.
Meanwhile, at the Sharq, in Doha, the talks between Taliban envoys and Kabul’s team offered little evidence that any diplomatic breakthrough was possible. Ghani’s delegates lived at the resort and had few ties to Qatar. The Taliban envoys, who had homes in Doha, as well as families and businesses, generally turned up at the resort “every two or three days,” and then only at night, Sarabi, the delegate from Kabul, recalled. “The time management was not good.” In early January, the Taliban delegations did not even appear for talks as scheduled.
By now, many of the Kabul delegates had lost any remaining faith that they had in Khalilzad. Sarabi accused him of “taking the side of the Taliban.” She said it was “very clear” that Khalilzad “wanted the Taliban to be the head of the government” as part of a transitional, power-sharing arrangement, and that he wanted Ghani to leave office. Khalilzad did believe that Ghani would have to give up power for a transitional government to be formed, but he said that he “never, ever” supported putting a Taliban leader in charge. To some extent, he blamed the impasse on Ghani’s intransigence. Later, Khalilzad said that his biggest mistake was failing to put even more pressure on Ghani to compromise.
In early 2021, Khalilzad and Blinken came up with a work-around. They would jump-start an “accelerated” peace process that would set aside the negotiations in Doha in order to leap to a final power-sharing deal between the Islamic Republic and the Taliban. Khalilzad helped write an eight-page draft of a so-called Afghanistan Peace Agreement, which was breathtakingly ambitious: it imagined a new constitution; a transitional government with an expanded parliament, to accommodate many Taliban members; reconstituted courts; a new body, the High Council for Islamic Jurisprudence; and a national ceasefire. He hoped that the Taliban and the Islamic Republic would agree to attend a peace summit in Turkey.
On March 22nd, Blinken met with NATO foreign ministers, who insisted that the U.S. should be doing more to try to forge a political settlement in Afghanistan. Blinken called Biden and said that he wanted to explore whether a troop withdrawal could be delayed until after the summit in Turkey, even though the Taliban had not yet agreed to participate. This would show NATO allies that the U.S. was listening, Blinken argued, but it would also mean breaking the Doha agreement.
Khalilzad met with the Taliban and argued that, if they wanted Afghanistan to enjoy international aid and recognition, they should accept a delay in the U.S. withdrawal so that a power-sharing agreement could be negotiated in Turkey. When Taliban negotiators observed that the Americans were talking about breaking the Doha accord, they did not directly threaten to renew attacks against U.S. and NATO forces. But they made clear that “bad things would happen,” a State Department official involved said.
On April 5th, Jon Finer, Biden’s deputy national-security adviser, called Mohib and said it was unlikely that the U.S. would withdraw from Afghanistan before May 1st. But any extension, he said, would be “for a limited time.” The White House continued to hope that talks with the Taliban might ease the transition. “It’s important that the Afghan government speak with one voice,” support the peace process “unambiguously,” and adopt a “constructive and mindful attitude” toward talks with the Taliban, Finer said. Mohib shared the news with Ghani: the American era in Afghanistan would end soon.
Ghani and Mohib both assumed that Biden would schedule a withdrawal for after the summer fighting season, when winter snows would likely limit Taliban mobility. Nine days later, when Biden announced his decision, he described the Trump Administration’s deal with the Taliban as “perhaps not what I would have negotiated myself,” but proceeded to order a full withdrawal by September 11th. Ghani posted a statement on Twitter expressing “respect” for Biden’s decision. “Afghanistan’s proud security and defense forces are fully capable of defending its people and country,” he wrote. Within days, the Taliban made clear that they would not participate in Khalilzad’s peace summit in Turkey. The years-long diplomatic effort by the United States to broker peace between the Taliban and the Islamic Republic had failed.
For years, the Taliban had been operating shadow governments in various rural areas, but they had never conquered and held a sizable Afghan city. NATO and, later, the Afghan Air Force had a monopoly on air power. The Taliban had no warplanes and no effective high-altitude anti-aircraft missiles, although they could bring down helicopters and low-flying planes with smaller arms. Whenever the Taliban massed for a major assault, or on the few occasions when they temporarily seized a city, they were vulnerable to devastating air strikes. After 2018, when Miller took command of Resolute Support, he had encouraged Ghani’s forces to redouble the use of élite Special Forces backed by air power. By 2021, the Afghan Air Force had eight thousand personnel and more than a hundred and eighty aircraft.
After Biden’s announcement, Miller began to pull U.S. soldiers from the country. As he did, the international contractors who maintained Afghanistan’s helicopters and fighter planes departed, too. “The companies are not going to keep people there if they don’t have blanket protection either from the U.S. or the NATO forces,” Miller said.
This past May, Yasin Zia, the chief of Army staff and acting minister of defense, learned that Central Command, the U.S. headquarters in charge of the Afghan war, would attempt to provide aircraft “tele-maintenance” by video, on iPads, employing specialists in Qatar. “They said the mechanic from our side would sit in front of the Zoom and the person from Qatar would advise him to do this or do that,” Zia recalled. Central Command also planned to open an aircraft-repair shop in the United Arab Emirates, about a thousand miles from Afghanistan, but Afghan helicopters could not fly that far, and Afghan airplanes had to traverse Pakistani airspace, requiring complicated negotiations with the Pakistani military. A senior State Department official involved said that by June “you could see there wasn’t going to be anything there” to keep Afghan aircraft flying. Maintenance aside, the essential problem, according to a senior Defense Department official, was that “we were leaving.” The entire Afghan military was designed to operate around U.S. systems and expertise, and when that was gone the Afghan forces unravelled.
In recent years, the Afghan military had inherited dozens of bases. According to Saleh, the First Vice-President, the bases were “defendable but not easy to supply.” They were especially so as the Taliban captured more territory and closed off highways. That spring, Saleh wrote, in an e-mail, “There were days when I would get up to a thousand messages on my WhatsApp or phone from these besieged [bases] asking for help.” Many stranded soldiers posted stories of desperation on social media. “The desertion rates increased up to seven hundred per day, due to hunger, thirst, lack of medivac, lack of logistics and air support,” Saleh said.
In early July, Ghani and his advisers returned from their visit to Washington, where they had made a show of their fortitude and optimism. But, Mohib recalled, “we were quite desperate.” When the U.S. troop withdrawal had started, the Taliban controlled around eighty of Afghanistan’s approximately four hundred administrative districts, according to estimates by the Long War Journal. By July 10th, the Taliban controlled more than two hundred. They quickly seized border crossings leading to Iran and Pakistan, and with them lucrative customs revenue. Then they choked off major cities and conquered new districts close to Kabul. “We couldn’t control the flow of it, and we weren’t entirely sure what the Americans could or could not provide,” Mohib said. “And the collapse started very quickly.”
On July 23rd, Biden called Ghani.“I need not tell you the perception around the world, and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things are not going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban,” he said. American generals had been trying to persuade Ghani to devise a new military plan that concentrated airpower on the defense of major population centers, such as Kabul. Biden proposed that Ghani hold a press conference the following week with well-known Afghan politicians, including Abdullah, Dostum, Karzai, and Mohammad Mohaqiq, a leader of Afghanistan’s Hazara minority. Biden envisaged “all of you standing together” with Bismillah Khan, the minister of defense, “backing up this new strategy” to defend Kabul and major cities.
“I’m not a military guy,” Biden continued, “so I’m not telling you what a plan should precisely look like,” but, if Ghani agreed to this idea, “you’re going to get not only more help” from the U.S. military but foster a change in perception. “We will continue to provide close air support, if we know what the plan is and what we are doing,” Biden added.
Ghani said that he would hold the press conference, but that his forces needed more American planes to conduct air strikes on the Taliban: “What is crucial is close air support.”
“Look, close air support works only if there is a military strategy on the ground to support,” Biden replied. He said that he would have one of his top generals call Ghani immediately, to synchronize military plans.
Two days later, the Pentagon announced that it had begun to carry out intensified air strikes against the Taliban, which would continue in the “coming weeks.” Ghani staged an appearance with political leaders and travelled to provinces and military bases to rally the armed forces. On August 2nd, as he presented his government’s new military strategy to parliament, he lashed out at the Biden Administration. “The reason for our current situation is that the decision was taken abruptly,” he said. Still, he forecast that his government would have matters “under control within six months.”
Ghani decided to travel to Tehran to attend the inauguration of Ebrahim Raisi, the new Iranian President, on August 5th. For some years, Ghani had been negotiating a security and economic agreement with Iran. Before he departed, he talked with Blinken. They spent the first ten or fifteen minutes reviewing the potential consequences for U.S. foreign policy of an agreement between Kabul and Tehran. Blinken warned Ghani, “If U.S. laws are violated, that would jeopardize our support.” The discussion presumed the Islamic Republic’s prolonged existence.
When they turned to the war, Ghani launched into a soliloquy about American mistakes, particularly the long pursuit of negotiations with the Taliban. Ghani’s negotiators in Doha had informed him, he told Blinken, that “all the Taliban want is military victory. With enormous respect, our international colleagues have misread the intentions and character of the Taliban. . . . The current posture of the Taliban is ‘Submit, submit, submit.’ . . . Do your colleagues and your staff have any other sense?”
Blinken said that there still might be a way for Ghani to find a deal “without compromising yourself.” Khalilzad was working on a new proposal: a one-month ceasefire in exchange for both sides releasing three thousand prisoners. Ghani rejected this outright. If he released thousands more Taliban prisoners, “the country will break. . . . Our security forces will not fight ever again.”
On August 6th, the Taliban captured Zaranj, in Nimruz Province, in the south, the first provincial capital to fall. The next day, the U.S. Embassy urged all American citizens to leave Afghanistan. Ghani’s office continued to post progress reports on social media about Afghanistan’s modernization drive. The press releases conveyed more than a whiff of unreality. “Maybe it was a coping mechanism,” Akbar, the chair of the human-rights commission, said, but the daily pretense of normalcy “just seemed like a parallel universe.” On August 10th, Ghani’s official Facebook page announced new infrastructure projects, including one in the northern city of Kunduz, where the Taliban flag now flew.
When the Taliban conquered Afghanistan during the mid-nineteen-nineties, they sometimes seized Afghan cities with minimal fighting, accepting the surrender of enemies without inflicting immediate reprisals. Quick, bloodless changes of power were a recurring pattern in the Afghan civil war, reflecting combatants’ sense of kinship, even amid merciless violence. Surrender, parole, and temporary local truces were established practices, alongside revenge killings and summary executions. Last summer, Bismillah Khan reported that the Taliban were offering Islamic Republic soldiers money, and a letter of passage, to protect them from harassment after they surrendered and went home. By August, “money was changing hands at a rapid rate,” a senior British military officer said, with Afghan security forces getting “bought off by the Taliban.”
For weeks, the U.S. and its European allies had tried to avoid evacuating their personnel or Afghans who worked for them, for fear that this would look like a rush to the exits, but by early August the British military had evacuated an Afghan intelligence outfit that intercepted communications by the Taliban. Provincial capitals now toppled one after another; on August 12th, Ghazni fell. That evening, Blinken and Lloyd Austin, Biden’s Secretary of Defense, called Ghani to inform him that three thousand U.S. troops would fly in to seize the Kabul airport. The troops were not being sent to defend Kabul against a Taliban assault; they were meant to protect evacuating American personnel. The next day, the Taliban took the major cities of Kandahar and Herat. Dostum, under siege, left the country for Uzbekistan, as did Ata Mohammad Noor, another powerful and independent leader in the north.
Khalilzad and his team, still grasping at a deal that might halt a Taliban assault on Kabul, asked Ghani to appoint a delegation led by Abdullah and Karzai that would fly to Doha and work out an orderly transition with Baradar and his colleagues. The idea was that Ghani would accept whatever this delegation negotiated—including his own departure from office. Ghani said that he was willing to give up power, but only if there were elections to identify his long-term successor. The Americans dismissed this as wildly unrealistic. On Saturday, August 14th, amid reports that Taliban units were already inside Kabul, Ghani dropped his demand. Now he simply hoped for an orderly transfer of power endorsed by a loya jirga.
He told Blinken that he was ready to accept whatever his envoys and the Biden Administration agreed on with the Taliban. Blinken asked him to “get the delegation to Doha” as quickly as possible, “to show the Taliban this is a serious process. We need a ceasefire to process this.”
“Please lean as much as you can on a dignified process,” Ghani said. He remained adamant that any transfer of power should be endorsed by the Afghan assembly. “Please convey to the Taliban that this is not a surrender.”
“Dignified is exactly what we want as well,” Blinken said.
Ghani told him that if the Taliban rejected this last effort to bring about an orderly transition, or did not negotiate in good faith, “I will fight to the death.” He appointed the delegation that Blinken had requested—thirteen people, including a son of Dostum, and Karzai, Abdullah, and Mohib—and announced that they would decide the Islamic Republic’s fate in discussions with the Taliban. Ghani told Mohib that, with this decision, he felt the Islamic Republic had all but ceased to exist.
In the world’s failed states, Ghani wrote, in a book published in 2008, “vicious networks of criminality, violence and drugs feed on disenfranchised populations and uncontrolled territory.” That problem lies “at the heart of a worldwide systemic crisis.” Afghanistan was poor but stable and peaceful for much of the twentieth century, until the Soviet invasion of 1979, which ignited forty-two years of continual warfare, much of it caused by outside powers. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. funded and armed Afghan extremists fighting the Soviet occupation of the eighties. Pakistan armed and funded the Taliban’s rise to power during the mid-nineties. The U.S.-led invasion after 9/11 empowered corrupt warlords around Afghanistan in the name of counterterrorism and, after the Taliban’s fall, failed to prevent Pakistan from fostering the movement’s revival. By the time Ghani became President, in 2014, the resurgent guerrillas had enjoyed a decade of sanctuary and covert aid from Pakistan’s Army and intelligence service, and they had badly shaken the Islamic Republic’s capacity to govern and defend itself. In the U.S. and Europe, public opinion had soured on the war, leading to reductions of troops and aid. For all of Ghani’s efforts to bolster Afghanistan’s young democracy, it was never likely that he would overcome this history, certainly not after 2017, when the Islamic Republic had to cope with the reckless decisions of Donald Trump.
Ghani’s last decision as President, to leave his country, is difficult to fully assess. Last August, a former Afghan Ambassador to Tajikistan accused Ghani of stealing more than a hundred and fifty million dollars while fleeing Afghanistan, although the Ambassador offered no evidence to back up his claim. Ghani has described these allegations as “completely and categorically false.” In the U.S., the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction has opened an inquiry, but the accusations remain a mystery.
It was in late July that Ghani and Mohib first discussed the possibility that they would be forced to flee. One of Ghani’s priorities was to remove his book collection from harm’s way. His preference was to retreat from the capital to eastern Afghanistan, where he had political and military allies. Mohib thought that if it became necessary to go abroad Tajikistan and Uzbekistan seemed the most plausible initial destinations, since both could be reached in a single flight aboard one of the Afghan President’s four Mi-17 helicopters. In August, Mohib asked Qahar Kochai, the director of the Afghan President Protective Service, to develop an emergency plan along these lines. But as the Taliban arrived at the outskirts of Kabul and the U.S. accelerated its evacuation of American and Afghan allies, Mohib didn’t know whether he and Ghani figured in Washington’s evacuation.
On the fourteenth, Mohib learned that one of his colleagues at the Presidential palace was on a list of at-risk Afghans approved by the U.S. Embassy for evacuation. That afternoon, Mohib spoke by phone with a contact at the State Department. During a discussion about peace talks, Mohib paused to ask, “Is there an evacuation plan for us, for me and Ghani?” The official asked for something in writing.
“I would like to request that I and PG be included in your evacuation plan in case the political settlement doesn’t work,” Mohib texted, referring to President Ghani.
“Received.”
The indefiniteness of the exchange unsettled Mohib. “I thought, My partners are not going to rescue us,” he recalled. He contacted a senior official in the United Arab Emirates, who assured him that the U.A.E. would provide for Ghani and his top aides. He said that the kingdom would dispatch an executive jet to Kabul on Monday the sixteenth, and that the plane would stand by at the airport, with pilots ready to fly on short notice.
Mohib belonged to a Signal group chat that included some of the country’s top intelligence and security officials. On the night of the fourteenth, bad news poured across the channel. Nangarhar had fallen to the Taliban, as had several other provinces. On Sunday morning, the fifteenth, Mohib walked from his official residence to Ghani’s office, for their daily staff meeting, at nine o’clock. The channel now reported that members of the Taliban had reached Kabul. The gunmen might be local Taliban who had decided to show themselves, they might be criminals posing as Taliban, or they might be the vanguard of an invasion force. There were also many reports that Kabul policemen, soldiers, and guards were taking off their uniforms and going home.
In Doha that morning, Khalilzad recalled, he met Baradar at the Ritz-Carlton. During their discussion, Baradar “agreed that they will not enter Kabul” and would withdraw what Baradar described as “some hundreds” of Taliban who had already entered the capital. Based on Ghani’s concessions the previous day, Khalilzad hoped to arrange a two-week ceasefire and an orderly transfer of power in Kabul, to be sanctified by a “mini loya jirga.” Khalilzad was in WhatsApp contact with Abdul Salam Rahimi, an aide to Ghani, and informed Rahimi of this plan. Rahimi told Ghani that the Taliban had pledged not to enter Kabul. Yet this was based on assurances from Khalilzad and the Taliban, and Ghani regarded both as unreliable sources.
The Arg palace and the U.S. Embassy were in Kabul’s so-called Green Zone, protected by blast walls and armed guards. Resolute Support monitored the streets from a surveillance blimp equipped with high-resolution cameras. At around nine that morning, Ross Wilson, the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Kabul, concluded from a variety of reports that so many police and guards had abandoned their posts that the Green Zone’s web of security on the streets had effectively collapsed. He consulted with Washington and ordered the immediate evacuation to the Kabul airport of all remaining U.S. personnel at the Embassy compound. To protect against leaks that might reach the Taliban or the Islamic State, Wilson did not inform Ghani that the Green Zone was no longer safe or of the decision to vacate the Embassy. Defense Department officials maintained a list of Afghan generals and high-ranking defense officials who would be evacuated from the country if necessary, but the Pentagon regarded Ghani’s possible evacuation as an issue for the State Department. According to State officials, the matter was never formally considered.
August 15th was a hot morning. At around eleven, Mohib joined the President and a diplomat from the U.A.E. at an outdoor meeting area, on a lawn beside the President’s office. As they discussed their possible evacuation plan, they could see a swarm of American Chinook and Black Hawk helicopters on the horizon, their motors thumping in the distance like muffled drums. Then they heard gunshots coming from somewhere outside the palace grounds. Ghani’s bodyguards hustled him inside.
At noon, Mohib joined Ghani in his library. They agreed that Rula, Ghani’s wife, and nonessential staff should leave for the U.A.E. as soon as possible. Mohib’s U.A.E. contacts offered seats on an Emirates Airlines flight scheduled to depart Kabul at four that afternoon. Ghani asked Mohib to escort Rula to Dubai, then join the negotiating team in Doha, to finalize talks with Khalilzad and Baradar about the handover of Kabul.
At roughly one o’clock, Mohib received a text message that Khalil Haqqani, a leader of the Taliban faction named for his family, wished to speak with him. He took a call from a Pakistani number. Haqqani’s message, Mohib recalled, was, essentially, “Surrender.” He said that they could meet after Mohib issued an appropriate statement. When Mohib proposed that they negotiate first, Haqqani repeated himself and hung up. Mohib called Tom West, a deputy to Khalilzad in Doha, to inform him of the call. West told him not to go to any meeting because it might be a trap.
Mohib returned to Ghani’s residence at around two. He escorted Rula in a motorcade to a helipad behind the Dilkusha palace. They were to fly to Hamid Karzai International Airport, to make the Emirates flight. Three of the President’s Mi-17s were now at the Arg; the fourth was at the airport. He learned that the pilots had fully fuelled the helicopters because they wanted to fly directly to Tajikistan or Uzbekistan, as soon as possible, as other Afghan military pilots seeking refuge had done in recent days. The pilots did not want to hop over to the airport with Rula, because they had received reports that rogue Afghan soldiers were seizing or grounding helicopters there. Kochai, the head of the Presidential guard, approached Mohib.
“If you leave, you will be endangering the President’s life,” he said.
“Do you want me to stay?” Mohib asked.
“No, I want you to take the President with you.”
Mohib doubted that all of Ghani’s bodyguards would remain loyal if the Taliban entered the palace grounds, and Kochai indicated that he did not have the means to protect the President. Mohib helped Rula onto the President’s helicopter and asked her to wait. With Kochai, he drove back to the residence.
He found Ghani standing inside and took his hand. “Mr. President, it’s time,” Mohib said. “We must go.”
Ghani wanted to go upstairs to collect some belongings, but Mohib worried that every minute they delayed they risked touching off a panic and a revolt by armed guards. Ghani climbed into a car, without so much as his passport.
At the helipad, staff and bodyguards scuffled and shouted over who would fly. The pilots said that each helicopter could carry only six passengers. Along with Ghani, Rula, and Mohib, nine other officials squeezed aboard, as did members of Ghani’s security detail. Dozens of other Arg palace staffers—including Rahimi, who was still talking with Khalilzad about a ceasefire, and had no idea where Ghani or Mohib had gone—were left behind.
At about two-thirty, the pilots started the engines. The three Mi-17s lifted slowly above the gardens of the palace, banked north, and flew over Kabul’s rooftops toward the Salang Pass and, beyond that, to the Amu Darya River and Uzbekistan.
(This is the first story in a two-part series.)
17. Is it really true that the active duty and veteran ranks are rife with extremists? Get the facts before you decide
Some interesting and important analysis about the insurrection.
Is it really true that the active duty and veteran ranks are rife with extremists? Get the facts before you decide
Since the January 6 Capitol siege, many media and even academic outlets have published articles that paint a disturbing picture suggesting the active duty and veteran ranks are virtually infested with domestic extremists. But are such stories really accurate? Do they over-hype data? Very recently MiltaryTimes published two examples, so let’s unpack them a bit and see if there is reason to question what they claim.
“[M]isinformation, disinformation, and malinformation”?
The first appeared on December 2 and was entitled It was written by persons who identify themselves as part of something called “ with the aim “to raise awareness of the threat of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation within the veteran community and better inform our fellow Americans of the tactics used by hostile influence operations.”
“[M]isinformation, disinformation, and malinformation”? Ok, but consider what the writers said in their essay:
“Following the election, misinformation and disinformation spreaders accelerated their efforts, incubated the Stop the Steal movement, and openly coordinated a direct attack on our democracy on Jan. 6. In the aftermath, we now know that nearly 15 percent of those arrested had military service backgrounds (compared with approximately 7 percent of the U.S. population).”
The figures “we now know” (from today, 10 December) as provided by GW show 79 of 693 persons charged in the Capitol riot had some military connection. This calculates to 11.3%, not “almost 15 percent.”
In other words, the “almost 15%” figure the “We the Veterans” writers cited is a whopping 32% larger than the actual 11.3% number. This is hardly a small ‘miss,’ and a curious one for an organization that touts itself as one to counter “malinformation.”
But even more importantly, they omitted an important nuance found in the April GW report they did cite.
A “very slight underrepresentation of veterans among the January 6 attacks”
Specifically, here’s what GW said (I broke this section into more paragraphs for readability, and bolded key parts):
As it applies to the Capitol Hill cases, simply comparing the number of individuals with military experience to the proportion of veterans in the broader U.S. population is misleading.
There is no reason to think that the arrestee population should be a representative sample of the U.S. population, so any interpretation needs to be cautious. Beyond this fact, the Capitol Hill military arrestees are overwhelmingly male (see the discussion below), yet the percentage of veterans in the U.S. population has a large portion of females overall.
So, it may be the case that the better comparison for the proportion of individuals with military experience is not with the overall proportion of veterans in the U.S. population, but the proportion of male veterans.
That number for the general population, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, is 14 percent. If we look only at the Capitol Hill federal cases 16 involving men, the percentage with military experience is 13.6 percent.
Comparing these two numbers suggests, if anything, that there actually is a very slight underrepresentation of veterans among the January 6 attacks. The bottom line is that, while there are reasons to focus on the presence of individuals with military experience among extremists, researchers, reporters, and policymakers need to recognize the nuance involved.
More garbled numbers
I believe part of the problem arises from the fact that very early reports about the January 6 siege, particularly that from NPR, put the percentage of those involved with a military connection even higher (“1 in 5”) than the “We the Veterans” writers did.
Disregarding the wisdom of the time-honored military axiom of “The First Report Is Usually Wrong,” too many reporters, pundits, and even academics continued to repeat the “1 in 5” report even when it became clear it was inaccurate. Did they do so because it fit the narrative they wanted to propound? You decide whenever you see that statistic quoted.
Other data might be technically accurate, but can nevertheless mislead. Consider the December 3rd MilitaryTimes article that made the following claim:
“Over the past three decades, the number of veterans involved in extremist crimes has shot up 350%, according to data from the”
Alarming? Of course; but digging into the data in the actual report can tell a different, less sensational story. It’s important to focus on the fact that the 350% figure comes from a database that “explores military service backgrounds of individuals who committed extremist crimes in the U.S. from 1990 through the first six months of 2021.” (Emphasis added.)
This means only a tiny percentage — .0045% — of vets were allegedly involved or, put another way, more than 99.9955% of the millions who served during that period were not involved in what the dataset claims are “extremist” crimes.
What is–or is not–included, and why?
What are “extremist” crimes? The data collectors say they included any vet who “committed a criminal offense that was clearly motivated by their ideological views and resulted in their arrest, indictment, or death.” Exactly how they determined what “clearly motivated” the actions of each of the 354 isn’t really explained. How did they get inside the heads of all of them? Criminologists tell us that
The data collectors also indicated that they counted as “extremist” criminal acts any “motivated by [the vets] political, economic, social, or religious goals.” Does this mean that a vet arrested for a misdemeanor trespassing or property crime (for which many if not most vets were arrested as a result of Jan 6 siege) in a social or racial justice demonstration (e.g., for misdemeanor acts of civil disobedience “motivated by political [or] social…goals”) likewise earn the label of having committed an “extremist” criminal offense? Even if no conviction resulted?
I would hope not, but if not, how – exactly – do the data collectors decide which fit or don’t fit among the many possible “political, economic, social, or religious goals” that may motivate an individual’s act?
These are the kinds of questions you might want to ask yourself when you see data like this. Even when well intended, a headline or excerpt can’t tell you everything you might want (or need) to know. This is why on Lawfire® you are encouraged to gather data yourself and we provide links when we can)
Further, as suggested above, the data collectors apparently co-mingle in their numbers those who were adjudicated as having “committed” an “extremist” crime (as they define it), with those who were merely arrested for one.
For example, they concede that the sharp increase in their 2021 numbers “is in part driven by the comparatively large number of subjects with military backgrounds who participated in the Capitol breach on January 6.” This makes their numbers a mess because in this country simply being “arrested” for a crime is not the same as having been found to have “committed” a crime. People are still innocent until proven guilty.
In short, you have every reason to be wary when you see such allegations of military “extremism.”
The Pentagon still hasn’t figured it out
An “extremism” definition is essential to determining the scope of the problem, which is fundamental to developing a plan to stamp it out. Indeed, on February 1st RAND policy analyst Heather Williams warned that the first step one in rooting out the problem would be to “figure out how pervasive the problem is.” Back in October, press reports said the definition was “imminent” but nothing has been forthcoming. If the Pentagon can’t settle on a definition after ten months, what is the public supposed to think, let alone the troops?
A May 2021 post: explored the “stand down” guidance the Pentagon did issue. It was disturbing.
Why? Here’s what I said then:
“[The Pentagon guidance] called upon servicemembers to inform on each other if they perceive “extremist behavior.” This is understandable if the behavior is illegal or contrary to some policy, but the Pentagon goes much further in demanding that military members also report their peers for activities that are fully lawful and compliant with all policies.
Specifically, here’s the troubling part of what military members have a “responsibility to report”:
Extremist behavior by Department personnel that does not rise to the level of a violation of the [Uniform Code of Military Justice] UCMJ or other applicable laws, or the Department of Defense’s, Military Department’s, or Military Service’s extremism policies may still be a concern under the U.S. Government’s national security adjudicative guidelines, used to assess eligibility for access to classified information or to hold a sensitive position. (Emphasis added.)
Evidently, someone could dutifully follow the law and all the military’s extremism policies yet still be labelled as exhibiting “extremist behavior” and potentially suffer career-ending security clearance denials, as well as being deprived of the opportunity to serve in “sensitive positions.”
In my book, the fact that this is still evidently the Pentagon’s position–along with the continued absence of a clear definition of “extremism”–is unconscionable.
Those that serve deserve better than this.
Much work yet to do
Although many media types, pundits, academics and others have already drawn their conclusions, I believe there is much work yet to do to discern exactly why some veterans were involved in the Capitol siege. I think it is quite possible that the popular “extremist” narrative may turn out to be off the mark.
There are lots of possibilities that ought to be examined. For example, back in February the Washington Post reported that a “” To my knowledge, no one has fully sussed out the precise reasons those with a military connection were allegedly involved in the Capitol siege, but it would not surprise me if a good number were among the majority the Post says suffered financial difficulties. Surveys have shown this:
Financial stress connected to military service is cited more than any other military-family issue by veteran spouses (54 percent) and military spouses (49 percent), as well as by veterans (44 percent). Among active-duty members, it ranks just below the stress of relocation.
Could still other factors have been involved? For example, what about PTSD? About 3.5% of the general population suffers PTSD (see here)., but the rate among veterans can be triple or quadruple that percentage (see here). Between 4 and 21% of the U.S.’s prison population suffer PTSD (see here) and, sadly, veterans represent “8% of the total incarcerated population in the US.”
This is why some states – Florida for example – have established special courts to adjudicate cases involving veterans. Florida explains the rationale for its veterans’ courts this way:
Veterans’ courts are designed to assist justice-involved defendants with the complex treatment needs associated with substance abuse, mental health, and other issues unique to the traumatic experience of war. Some veterans returning home from war find it difficult to integrate back into the community. Veterans with untreated substance abuse or mental health illnesses, including those with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI), may find it even harder to return home, which can sometimes lead to criminal activity.
Have Federal prosecutors adopted the approach of the Florida courts because of the issues so many veterans have? No. Quite the opposite, they favor the never-served with more leniency than they afford those who did. The Philadelphia Inquirer
[I]n least five cases so far, prosecutors have cited a rioter’s military service as a factor weighing in favor of a jail sentence or house arrest. Prosecutors have repeatedly maintained that veterans’ service, while commendable, made their actions on Jan. 6 more egregious.
Decide for yourself if it is the right thing to do, in an era when so few serve, to use the service of the those who did put on the uniform to enhance their punishment.
Or is the Florida approach (and that of similar courts in other states) better? Or, at a minimum, should veterans get at least the same beneficial treatment from prosecutors as those who never served?
You decide.
Concluding observations
My point in all this is that before anyone assumes those who served or are still serving harbor nefarious motivations related to racism and extremism , they need to get the facts. As we so often say on Lawfire®, things can be way more complicated than they seem.
In this post we examined just two of many similar articles that make it appear that the military’s active and retired ranks are rife with extremism. No one seems to pay much attention to that fact that, for example, only one of 1.3 million active duty members of the U.S. armed forces has been arrested in connection with the January 6th siege.
Likewise, few articles try to provide balance by noting studies that find that “[a]cross a number of metrics — volunteerism, voting, charitable giving and community involvement — veterans of all generations tend to be more involved and more generous than non-veterans, even if not always overwhelmingly so.” .
Back in March my friend Mackubin Owens was obliged to observe that the “fact that there were veterans among the rioters who unlawfully entered the Capitol on January 6, the persistent claim that Trump appealed to extremist groups, and Trump’s popularity with the military form the basis for proliferating allegations that the military has become ”
Owens rightly insists that the “accusation that the military is full of racists and extremists is false, and damaging.” Indeed, it is hurting the military: there are reports that interest in joining the military is dropping among Black men, Hispanic men, and women. If we are going to have the military we need in the years to come it is imperative that these groups feel welcome. To do so, we have to change the inaccurate narrative about the military and those who have served.
Of course, as Owens points out, there “have been serious racial incidents involving military service members in the past’ adding that “military leaders were quick to deal with the perpetrators appropriately.” His key point is this: “the idea that racism is somehow pervasive in the military is nonsense.”
The military like American society in general has issues that need to be addressed, but inflating – and conflating – extremism allegations beyond anything justified by the facts is wrong, counterproductive, and harming America’s national security.
Remember what we like to say on Lawfire®: gather the facts, examine the law, evaluate the arguments – and then decide for yourself!
18. One of the military's most common infiltration methods is a risky maneuver no matter who's doing it
Most common. But when I came into Special Forces in the 1980s I recall this technique at one time being classified or at least only used by special mission units. But within a few years it became commonplace and is obviously a much superior method than rappelling (especially if speed is of the essence to reduce the amount of time a helicopter must hover over the LZ).
But training is dangerous which is why we have to train hard and often to sustain the skills.
Again, rest in peace Frogman.
One of the military's most common infiltration methods is a risky maneuver no matter who's doing it
US Marines conduct a fast-rope exercise aboard amphibious assault ship USS America, February 18, 2020.US Navy/MCS Seaman Jomark A. Almazan
An experienced Navy SEAL died this week after being injured in a fast-rope training exercise.
Fast-roping is a common infiltration method used by special-operations and conventional units.
It's a convenient and effective way to insert troops quickly, but fast-roping has inherent dangers.
On Tuesday, a seasoned Navy SEAL officer died after an accident during routine training in Virginia Beach.
Cmdr. Brian Bourgeois, the commanding officer of SEAL Team 8, suffered serious injuries during a nighttime fast-rope insertion exercise over the weekend. He died at a hospital in Norfolk, Virginia.
Fast-roping is one of the most common infiltration methods, used mainly by special-operations forces but also by some conventional units. It's a convenient and effective way to insert troops, but it has some inherent dangers.
Slide for life
US Army Special Forces soldiers conduct fast-rope training during night training in Morocco, June 15, 2021.US Army/Sgt. Jake Cox
The Fast Rope Insertion Extraction System (FRIES), the technique's official name, is used to get special operators out of a helicopter or tilt-rotor aircraft and on target quickly.
Fast-roping uses a very thick rope attached to a bar on the fuselage of an aircraft — usually an MH-60 Blackhawk, an MH-47G Chinook, or a CV-22 Osprey — that is rolled out once on target.
Usually, a sandbag on the end of the rope holds it in place on the ground, keeping the rope from getting tangled and endangering the troops. Then, special operators wearing thick, heat-resistant gloves mount the rope and slide to the ground.
"You straighten your legs and hold tight on the rope. Imagine like you're trying to enter a room through a window like they do in movies. You straighten your legs like that, and then you slide down," a Special Forces operator assigned to a National Guard unit told Insider.
A Marine demonstrates a secured position during fast-rope training aboard USS America, August 23, 2020.US Navy/MCS3 Walter Estrada
Depending on the airframe, an aircraft could have two ropes being used by exiting troops simultaneously, making the insertion that much faster. Unlike rappelling, there can be more than one troop on the same rope. Most special-operations units around the world use the technique.
"Fast-rope is a great way to get quickly on the target. A well-trained assault team can fast-rope from the bird on the target in only a few seconds. There is an element of danger to the bird and the operators during this process, but that's an acceptable risk — plus there is almost always some kind of overhead support covering the insertion. The fast-roping bird also has some of its organic defensive systems that can put down a good cover if need be," a retired Delta Force operator told Insider.
The Army has a course for experienced troops to become FRIES Masters and supervise fast-rope trainings or insertions during real-world operations.
During this course, prospective FRIES Masters have to pass written and verbal exams, rappel from a 40-foot tower with and without a combat load, show proficiency in rigging an aircraft for FRIES operations, and conduct nighttime and daytime fast-ropes with and without a combat load — all without any safety violations during the course.
US Army Special Forces soldiers practice fast-roping from a CV-22B Osprey in Germany, April 24, 2014.US Army/Erich Backes
"Fast-rope is one of the first insertion methods you learn in SOF [special-operations forces]. It has a very small barrier to entry and requires almost no real skill. You just have to hold tight to the rope and use your legs correctly. That's it. It helps if you aren't afraid of heights!" added the retired Delta Force commando, speaking anonymously because he still works with the US government.
In regions like the Indo-Pacific, where dense foliage and jungles create a restricted operational environment for aircraft, fast-roping is a valuable technique, as it puts troops on the ground without the aircraft having to land.
In the last few years, conventional infantry units have begun fast-roping as well.
Fast-roping is not the first insertion method exclusive to special missions units — like Delta Force and the former SEAL Team 6 — to be adopted by conventional units.
"This is in fact an intended outcome of ours," the former Delta operator said. "We take pride in experimenting and developing equipment, TTPs [tactics, techniques, and procedures], and insertion methods for the joint force."
A dangerous insertion method
Cpl. John West, and Dan, a military working dog, perform a fast-rope exercise aboard USS America, February 18, 2020.US Navy/MCS Vincent E. Zline
During fast-rope insertions, special operators aren't hooked to the rope. Their grip with their hands and feet is their only security. Should their hands slip or their boots slide, it can be a long fall, ranging from 20 feet to 100 feet.
"It's a great tool to get guys on target fast and grouped [together]. If the helicopter can't land, then fast-rope is the best answer. You can bring dogs with you too," the National Guard Green Beret said, speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to talk to the media.
"It can be dangerous, though. The reports mention that the SEAL was injured during a nighttime fast-rope. These are more dangerous because you [can't] see shit and you have all the noise from the rotor blasting in your ears," the Green Beret added.
Bourgeois is the first senior Navy SEAL to die in almost a decade. In 2012, Cmdr. Job Price, the commanding officer of SEAL Team 4, died while deployed to Afghanistan.
It is very unusual for officers of Bourgeois' rank to die in training, but the Navy SEAL officer apparently led from the front and shared the same dangers as his men, even at 43 years old.
Stavros Atlamazoglou is a defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate.
19. FDD | The U.S. Must Better Explain Al-Qaeda to the Public
Excerpts:
“Al-Qaeda also uses Syria as a base for threats reaching into Syria, Iraq and beyond,” the statement read. “The removal of this al-Qaeda senior leader [al-Matar] will disrupt the terrorist organization’s ability to further plot and carry out global attacks threatening U.S. citizens, our partners, and innocent civilians.”
Still, the U.S. military didn’t elaborate on Abdul Hamid al-Matar’s specific role within al-Qaeda, or why he was thought to present a threat to Americans.
The media and various non-governmental organizations understandably scrutinize American airstrikes for civilian casualties. In September, the New York Times reported that the U.S. military’s airstrike in Kabul during America’s chaotic withdrawal hadn’t killed an ISIS planner, as the government claimed, but instead an innocent man and his family. Only then did the U.S. military admit it was a “tragic mistake.” Two months later, the New York Times reported that dozens of civlians were killed when the U.S. bombed one of the Islamic State’s last strongholds in Baghuz, Syria in March 2019. This prompted CENTCOM to acknowledge the misbegotten strikes “for the first time.”
But there is another aspect of America’s ongoing drone campaign that deserves additional scrutiny. The U.S. government does an exceptionally poor job of explaining al-Qaeda to the public. So we often don’t know much about the alleged terrorists who are being hunted in the first place.
FDD | The U.S. Must Better Explain Al-Qaeda to the Public
The government is doing too little to inform Americans about the threats presented by suspected terrorists it is targeting.
fdd.org · by Thomas Joscelyn Senior Fellow and Senior Editor of FDD's Long War Journal · December 10, 2021
On December 3, the U.S. military targeted a suspected “senior al-Qaeda leader and planner” in a drone strike near the city of Idlib in northwestern Syria. The bombing proved to be controversial almost immediately. The alleged jihadist was traveling on a motorbike near a car carrying a family of six, all of whom were wounded in the blast. A 10-year-old boy reportedly suffered the worst injuries, including to his head.
U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) quickly recognized that the drone strike, launched by a MQ-9 Reaper, may have caused unintended civilian casualties. “We abhor the loss of innocent life and take all possible measures to prevent them,” Capt. Bill Urban, a CENTCOM spokesperson, said in a statement. “We are initiating a full investigation of the allegations and will release the results when appropriate.” Before CENTCOM could release its findings, pictures of the family and their damaged car circulated online, meaning the public could draw its own conclusions.
The U.S. military has hunted senior al-Qaeda personnel in Syria for years, but often provides few details concerning those targeted. This is a problem. Civilians are being killed in U.S. drone strikes in Syria and elsewhere, but the U.S. government often does not provide clear justifications for those bombings in the first place. Sometimes it is clear why an al-Qaeda figure was targeted. On other occasions, however, it isn’t obvious at all.
The December 3 air strike is a case in point. During a press briefing on December 6, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby explained that the target was a man known as Musab Kinan and he was “a senior leader with Hurras al-Din, which is an al-Qaeda affiliated group.” Other reports disputed this version, saying Kinan was a former member of Hurras al-Din, but not currently active within the organization.
Either way, the truth is we know little about Musab Kinan or why he was targeted. A family was wounded in the bombing, but we have no idea why the U.S. military thought it was necessary to incur this risk.
The U.S. likes to target terrorists driving alone, or with other suspected terrorists. This is suspposed to minimize the risk to others. Kinan was riding alone on a motorcycle. But even in this instance there was the potential to do harm to others nearby. Drone strikes are intended to minimize collateral damage, but even the most careful operator is going to make mistakes and there are going to be unintended consequences.
Hurras al-Din (HAD), meaning the “Guardians of Religion,” is indeed an al-Qaeda group. HAD openly signals its loyalty to al-Qaeda’s top men in its media and messaging. And while Kinan was an obscure figure and previously unknown to the public, other HAD leaders are well-known al-Qaeda veterans.
In early 2018, HAD broke away from the much larger Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which was formerly an official al-Qaeda branch. There is still much we don’t know about the disputes between the two and the role played by al-Qaeda’s senior leadership. But HAD is thought to have a few thousand members in Syria.
Why did Kinan command the U.S. government’s attention? We don’t know. Beyond his alleged role within HAD, the U.S. military hasn’t offered any details concerning his activities. Did he specifically threaten the U.S. or American interests in some fashion? Again, we don’t know.
And this isn’t the first time the U.S. has offered little information about a target in Syria or elsewhere.
In September, CENTCOM said it targeted another senior “senior al-Qaeda leader” in Idlib, Syria. “Initial indications are that we struck the individual we were aiming for, and there are no indications of civilian casualties as a result of the strike,” LT Josie Lynne Lenny said in a statement. That was it – no other information was provided. We learned the identity of the target, another HAD figure, only because jihadists discussed the airstrike on social media.
In October, the U.S. killed still another “senior al-Qaeda leader” in a MQ-9 Reaper strike in Syria. That jihadist was identified as a man known as Abdul Hamid al-Matar. CENTCOM’s announcement provided a bit more justification for targeting al-Matar, but still offered only generalities. CENTCOM explained that al-Qaeda “continues to present a threat to America and our allies” and is using “Syria as a safe haven to rebuild, coordinate with external affiliates, and plan external operations.”
“Al-Qaeda also uses Syria as a base for threats reaching into Syria, Iraq and beyond,” the statement read. “The removal of this al-Qaeda senior leader [al-Matar] will disrupt the terrorist organization’s ability to further plot and carry out global attacks threatening U.S. citizens, our partners, and innocent civilians.”
Still, the U.S. military didn’t elaborate on Abdul Hamid al-Matar’s specific role within al-Qaeda, or why he was thought to present a threat to Americans.
The media and various non-governmental organizations understandably scrutinize American airstrikes for civilian casualties. In September, the New York Times reported that the U.S. military’s airstrike in Kabul during America’s chaotic withdrawal hadn’t killed an ISIS planner, as the government claimed, but instead an innocent man and his family. Only then did the U.S. military admit it was a “tragic mistake.” Two months later, the New York Times reported that dozens of civlians were killed when the U.S. bombed one of the Islamic State’s last strongholds in Baghuz, Syria in March 2019. This prompted CENTCOM to acknowledge the misbegotten strikes “for the first time.”
But there is another aspect of America’s ongoing drone campaign that deserves additional scrutiny. The U.S. government does an exceptionally poor job of explaining al-Qaeda to the public. So we often don’t know much about the alleged terrorists who are being hunted in the first place.
Thomas Joscelyn is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Senior Editor for FDD’s Long War Journal. Follow Tom on Twitter @thomasjoscelyn. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, non-partisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Thomas Joscelyn Senior Fellow and Senior Editor of FDD's Long War Journal · December 10, 2021
20. Gaza Militant Group Raises Funds via Cryptocurrency for Jihad Against Israel
Gaza Militant Group Raises Funds via Cryptocurrency for Jihad Against Israel | FDD's Long War Journal
Via the militant group’s media wing, al-Buraq, Liwa al-Tawhid, a Salafi-jihadist group in Gaza and a member of al-Nasser Salah al-Din Brigades, recently published a message requesting support in the form of cryptocurrency to fund their jihad against Israel.
“Madad campaign – To support the mujahideen of the Nasser Salah al-Din Brigades, Liwa al-Tawhid. Contribute to equipping a mujahid in occupied Palestine. The Prophet said, he who equips a mujahid, or took care of a mujahid’s family, Allah rewards him as if he also went to jihad,” the message stated.
The group also published a Bitcoin address where the virtual cryptocurrency could be sent to. For those not technically inclined, the group stated a user could contact the administrator of the channel and make arrangements to deliver funds.
The use of cryptocurrency by Gaza’s militant groups as an alternative to raising funds and circumventing international anti-terrorism laws has gone mainstream over the last several years. Groups sanctioned as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) by the United States such as Hamas and al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades have adopted this method of fundraising with varying degrees of success.
Citing a senior Hamas official, The Wall Street Journal reported in June a ‘spike’ in bitcoin donations to Hamas during the conflict against Israel and that ‘some of the money gets used for military purposes [al-Qassam Brigades] to defend the basic rights of the Palestinians.’
This is likely the reason behind Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz’s July decision to sign an administrative seizure order for the cryptocurrency wallets and addresses used by Hamas to funnel funds to the militant group.
It is difficult to say if Liwa al-Tawhid has had any success in receiving funding for their cause since the launch of their cryptocurrency campaign. However, analyzing the Bitcoin address the group provided for supporters to transfer funds, a total of zero Bitcoin has so far been transferred.
Unlike Hamas and other militant groups, Liwa al-Tawhid has evaded action against their finance operation thus allowing them to continue using cryptocurrency to raise funds for jihad against Israel.
Joe Truzman is a contributor to FDD's Long War Journal.
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V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
